Context . Empathy, a key social skill, is essential for communication and collaboration in SE but remains an under-researched topic. Aims . This study investigates empathy in SE from practitioners’ perspectives, aiming to characterize its meaning, identify barriers, discuss practices to overcome them, and explore its effects. Method . A qualitative content analysis was conducted on 55 web articles from DEV and Medium, two communities widely used by practitioners. To strengthen our findings, we conducted a follow-up survey with empathy experts. Results . The study proposes a definition of empathy in SE, identifies barriers such as toxic culture and excessive technical focus, practices to foster empathy in teams, and outcomes, including improved collaboration, communication, and reduced anxiety, frustration, and stress. These findings are synthesized into a conceptual framework. Conclusion . Survey results indicate the framework is clear, valuable, and raises empathy awareness, with suggestions for improvements and integration into training. This study paves the way for improving team dynamics by addressing barriers and offering strategies to cultivate empathy. Future work will explore empathy’s broader implications in SE practice.

This is the Replicated Computational Results (RCR) Report for our TOSEM article “Exploring Empathy in Software Engineering: Insights from a Gray Literature Analysis of Practitioners’ Perspectives” where we present qualitative content analysis conducted on 55 web articles from DEV and Medium, two communities widely used by practitioners, and a follow-up survey with empathy experts. In this article, we introduced a conceptual framework of empathy in software engineering. As part of this RCR, we provide an empirical package with detailed guidelines to set up and replicate our study, as well as to interpret the results. We hope it can motivate and support future research on empathy and human aspects in software engineering by offering a reusable and transparent example of qualitative analysis involving gray literature and expert feedback. All related data and materials are openly available in the experimental package.

COVID-19 is highly transmissible and pathogenic, representing a potential threat to health conditions in correctional environments worldwide. This threat could worsen in prison systems in developing countries due to high crowding levels, lack of individual hygiene materials, inadequate primary sanitary conditions, and difficulties in using health services. Attempts to provide a landscape of academic research findings on COVID-19 data usage from prison systems in developing countries have been limited. This scenario motivated us to carry out this systematic mapping study (SMS) to provide a comprehensive overview of the impacts that may prevent the effective use of COVID-19 data, critical issues, and gaps in the current academic research. Following the steps of a systematic mapping, we examined 79 studies returned from a search string and eight studies returned from the use of the snowballing technique and selected 37 from related journals and conferences published between 2020 and 2021. The results point to possible problems in the use of COVID-19, preventing its effective use in information systems.

The migration of legacy software systems to a microservice based architecture is not a trivial task due to challenges and difficulties as reported in the literature. The concept of microservices mainly consists in software organized as a suite of small, modular, and independently deployed services that run on their own processes and communicate through well-defined, lightweight mechanisms to serve a business goal. However, the literature is still incipient in relation to step-by-step guidelines supporting practitioners to accomplish the migration from an existing, monolithic structure to a microservice based architecture. Goal: Discuss lessons learned from the migration of legacy software systems to microservices-based architecture. Method: We conducted two studies (a pilot and a case study) aiming at characterizing the relevants steps of such guidelines. Results: We report the steps and challenges observed during the migration reported in this study. Conclusion: We identify at least three main phases that drive the migration process.

Context: Code smells are associated with poor design and programming style that often degrades code quality and hampers code comprehensibility and maintainability.Goal: In this paper, we investigated to which extent classes affected by the God Class and Long Method code smells were more susceptible to the occurrence of software bugs. Method:We conducted an exploratory study targeting two well known open source software projects, Apache Tomcat and Eclipse JDT Core Component.We applied correlation analysis in order to evaluate to which extent Long Method and God Class were related to the occurrence of bugs.Results: We have found a significant correlation of Long Method and Commits and, on the other hand, a poor correlation of God Class and Commits in the two analyzed projects.Therefore, we expected that the higher the number of occurrences of Long Method, the higher the chances of more commits in a class that contains this method, which could result in the increase of occurrence of bugs.Conclusion: Based on the results, we confirmed what other studies pointed out, regarding classes affected by Long Method being more bug-prone than others.In practice, we found evidence, from analyzed data, that the occurrence of Long Method implies more effort in maintenance tasks.

Currently, there is the need for systems to manage repositories of MATLAB code bases capable of supporting global queries and feed their results to analyses components.Such features are not directly supported in current platforms.This paper presents a repository management system that supports queries over semi-automatically annotated code files and are able to associate them to higher level concepts.To meet this need, this paper proposes an approach that equips the repository with support for sophisticated queries over its stored code base and allows patterns to emerge from such queries, namely for visualisation and further analysis.This is achieved through the synergistic combination of a token-based metrics extraction component and a relational model fed by an ubiquitous data mining process.The code base is represented by means of relational knowledge, enabling intelligent queries that can be extended with new code metrics.Presently, query results are being used for the detection of concerns, including those whose code is scattered over multiple modular units.This paper outlines the proposed system's architecture and presents a proof-ofconcept implementation developed for MATLAB programs.It is evaluated by means of a set of illustrative queries over a seed repository of MATLAB systems.

Context: Cloud computing has been one of the most promising computing paradigms in industry to provide a customizable and resourceful platform to deploy software. There are a number of competing providers and available services that allows organizations to access computing services without owning the corresponding infrastructure. Goal: Identify the main characteristics of opportunities to migrate to the cloud, the respective challenges and difficulties as well as factors that affect the cost-benefit relationship of such adoption. Method: This paper presents a systematic literature review to compare reported strategies of organizations to migrate and adopt cloud computing and their perception of the cost-benefit of this adoption. Results: The overall data collected from these studies depicts that a significant part of the companies perceived inclination towards for the innovation adoption process influenced by technological, organizational and environmental contexts. Conclusion: Due to the variety of strategies, approaches and tools reported in the primary studies, it is expected that the results in this systematic literature review would help in establishing knowledge on how the companies should adopt and migrate to the cloud, how the cost-benefit relationship can be evaluated as well as providers can be selected. These findings can be a useful reference to develop guidelines for an effective use of cloud computing.

Multiple view interactive environments (MVIEs) provide visual resources to support the comprehension of a specific domain dataset.For any domain, different views can be selected and configured in a real time fashion to be better adjusted to the user needs.This paper focuses on the use of a MVIE called OctMiner to support the comprehension of MATLAB and GNU/Octave programs.The authors conducted a case study to characterize the use of OctMiner in the context of comprehension activities.Results provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of OctMiner to support the comprehension of programs written in MATLAB and Octave.

Modern IDE provides several resources to visually represent and explore the software. Nonetheless, there is limited empirical evidence of how those resources are utilized in specific software engineering activities. This has led to several studies to characterize the usage of IDE resources. The majority of these studies rely on methods that are costly and time consuming. This paper proposes a visual approach to help the characterization of IDE usage during software maintenance activities. It works by gathering data for all primitive operations performed by the programmers on the IDE, registering it in a log file and presenting the information abstracted from this log in an interactive visual interface. The interface transforms the fine-grained log data into meaningful information to represent how programmers use the IDE resources.

Modern IDEs offer built-in support for developing plug-ins. More recently, we have seen a growing number of plug-ins that offer non-conventional software visualization interfaces. They usually aim to help programmers to understand unfamiliar source code by representing it in visual structures such as trees, scatter-plots or graphs. Although very attractive visually, we need to know more about the effectiveness of these interfaces in conveying information to software engineers. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to empirically evaluate how useful are non-conventional visual paradigms in supporting software comprehension activities. The results for the first pilot study indicated that our experimental environment was consistent and could move to a full scale controlled experiment.