Context: Tertiary studies in software engineering ([email protected]) are widely used to synthesise evidence on a research topic systematically. As part of their protocol, [email protected] define inclusion and exclusion criteria (IC/EC) aimed at selecting those secondary studies (SS) to be included in the analysis. Aims: To provide a state of the art on the definition and application of IC/EC in [email protected], and from the results of this analysis, we outline an emerging framework, TSICEC, to be used by SE researchers. Method: To provide the state of the art, we conducted a systematic mapping (SM) combining automatic search and snowballing over the body of SE scientific literature, which led to 50 papers after application of our own IC/EC. The extracted data was synthesised using content analysis. The results were used to define a first version of TSICEC. Results: The SM resulted in a coding schema, and a thorough analysis of the selected papers on the basis of this coding. Our TSICEC framework includes guidelines for the definition of IC/EC in [email protected] Conclusion: This paper is a step forward establishing a foundation for researchers in two ways. As authors, understanding the different possibilities to define IC/EC and apply them to select SS. As readers, having an instrument to understand the methodological rigor upon which [email protected] may claim their findings.

Software release planning is the activity of deciding what is to be implemented, when and by who. It can be divided into two tasks: strategic planning (i.e., the what) and operational (i.e., the when and the who). Replan, the tool that we present in this demo, handles both tasks in an integrated and flexible way, allowing its users (typically software product managers and developer team leaders) to (re)plan the releases dynamically by assigning new features and/or modifying the available resources allocated at each release. A recorded video demo of Replan is available at https://youtu.be/PNK5EUTdqEg.

Continuous software engineering is a new trend that is gaining increasing attention of the research community in the last years. The main idea behind this trend is to tighten the connection between the software engineering lifecycle activities (e.g., development, planning, integration, testing, etc.). While the connection between development and integration (i.e., continuous integration) has been subject of research and is applied in industrial settings, the connection between other activities is still in a very early stage. We are contributing to this research topic by proposing our ideas towards connecting the software development and software release planning activities (i.e., continuous software release planning). In this paper we present our initial findings on this topic, how we envision to address the continuous software release planning, and a research agenda to fulfil our objectives.

Schema mappings define relationships between schemas in a declarative way. We demonstrate MVT, a mapping validation tool that allows the designer to ask whether the mapping has certain desirable properties. The answers to these questions will provide information on whether the mapping adequately matches the intended needs and requirements. MVT is able to deal with a highly expressive class of mappings and database schemas, which allows the use of negations, order comparisons and null values. The tool does not only provide a Boolean answer as test result, but also a feedback for that result. Depending on the tested property and on the test result, the provided feedback can be in the form of example schema instances, or in the form of an explanation, that is, highlighting the mapping assertions and schema constraints responsible for getting such a result.

A query is unlively if it always returns an empty answer. Debugging a database schema requires not only determining unlively queries, but also fixing them. To the best of our knowledge, the existing methods do not provide the designer with an explanation of why a query is not lively. In this paper, we propose a method for computing explanations that is independent of the particular method used to determine liveliness. It provides three levels of search: one explanation, a maximal set of non-overlapping explanations, and all explanations. The first two levels require only a linear number of calls to the underlying method. We also propose a filter to reduce the number of these calls, and experimentally compare our method with the best known method for finding unsatisfiable subsets of constraints.