With the exponential expansion of information on the internet, users are increasingly encountering challenges in locating the necessary information within an intricate web information system (WIS). Meanwhile, developers struggle to craft user interfaces that deliver optimal user experiences (UX) within complex web architectures. Chatbots, emerging as integral components within new WISs, serve as complementary elements to traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, the absence of established methods providing clear guidelines or practices for implementing Chatbots on an existing WIS remains a notable gap. This study aims to address this gap by proposing an approach that transforms existing web functionalities into conversational interfaces (i.e., Chatbot interfaces). We present a comprehensive step-by-step guideline and a set of patterns to facilitate the conversion, referred to as “Chatbotification.” To validate the feasibility of our proposed approach, we implemented Chatbots11https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbxnnt2GrfM using two distinct frameworks, Rasa and GPT. The conducted experimental results show that all participants also found that the Chatbots are easy to use and understandable, while it takes an average of a few interactions to complete a given task with the Chatbots.

The Software Engineering (SE) course primarily teaches students how to develop and maintain high-quality software using systematic processes, methods, and tools. Five teaching issues in the SE course, including course breadth, limited teaching assistant resources, limited teaching interaction, learning weaknesses, and poor team communication, hinder students from absorbing technical concepts, knowledge, and skills for necessary subjects in the SE field. In recent years, Digital Interactive Learning has received increasing attention. Among them, Chatbot was significantly under the spotlight. It can confirm the user's intention by analyzing the content of the dialogue and simulating a human conversation. To address the teaching issues for the SE course and leverage the benefits brought by Chatbots, in this study, we designed a Chatbot system, called TABot, to assist teaching and learning, especially for the SE course. This study designed multiple features that support students' learning, such as frequently asked questions, requests for course materials, and adaptive quiz practices. Furthermore, TABot also provides team supporting functions, such as reading the user requirements of their team project, group member contribution analysis, and GitHub commit retrieval. After being applied to an SE course, 80% of the students agreed that TABot could help them learn better for the SE course.

With the progressive development of technology, programming learners have significantly increased. However, the lack of human tutors and the rapidly updating information cause the learners to spend a considerable amount of time browsing and filtering authentic online resources, and decrease learning efficiency. Although many coding websites and programming communities can provide credible advice, it is still a challenge for learners to figure out their accurate questions. Therefore, we devised a Chatbot system, named PSAbot, to consider the above issue. PSAbot supports keyword extraction and analysis for multiple posts to guide the users through questions. PSAbot applies word embedding, sentence similarity, LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic modeling, and weighting functions to help filter out redundant information and decrease the time cost of browsing, and further improve the learning efficiency. The conducted experiments show that about 80% of the Top1 answers recommended by PSAbot can largely meet the user expectations.

The microservice system architecture (MSA) outperforms the monolithic system architecture in terms of maintainability, extensibility, scalability, and fault tolerance. This is prompting a widescale migration of software systems from existing monolith systems to MSA. Most microservice systems utilize container technology for deployment. The fact that Kubernetes (K8s) provides a fully-fledged toolchain for managing container-based applications is prompting many organizations to adopt the K8s protocol for microservice system deployment and operations. Microservice monitoring is essential to the success of any service operation. The collection of logs and aggregation of metrics by most existing microservice monitoring systems is somewhat intrusive. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of Kubernetes technology means that most monitoring methods are inapplicable in situations where microservices are developed for a system using a variety of underlying languages and platforms. In the current study, we developed a monitoring mechanism that provides various metrics specific to microservice systems in a nonintrusive way. The proposed K8s-based microservice monitoring system, referred to as KMamiz (Kubernetes-based Microservice Analysis and Monitoring using Istio and Zipkin), enables the construction and visualization for service-level/endpoint-level dependency graphs and endpoint request chains, and the service cohesion/coupling analysis to enhance system quality for the development team.

Microservice architecture has become increasingly popular due to its good maintainability, scalability, fault tolerance, and extensibility. In addition to the REST style of microservices that has been widely used, the event-driven style of microservices is also gaining more and more attention. However, the current software testing methods have little support for event-driven architecture, and the technical complexity of event-driven microservices has further increased the difficulty of testing. In this regard, we propose a software testing tool for event-driven microservice systems called CCTS (Composite Contract Testing Service). By combining consumer-driven contract testing and the event-driven state model, CCTS records the state transitions of event exchange between services, and automatically retrieves the possible transition paths among services. Simultaneously, CCTS analyzes the event logs from the target system to determine whether the event logs conformed with the specified transitions of states and retrieved paths. Besides, CCTS checks the validity of contract testing to ensure that the communication through services. To evaluate CCTS, we conducted functional testing for CCTS using a real-world microservice system. The results show that CCTS can effectively detect potential defects in the event-driven microservice system, such as isolated states, cyclic states, incomplete contract tests, and unqualified event sequences.

Abstract Despite the growing importance of the microservice architecture (MSA), interactions among the various elements (e.g., services, endpoints, and versions) remain difficult to manage. This research devised a system, called version‐based microservice analysis, monitoring, and visualization (VMAMV), including multiple proposed methods to facilitate the testing, monitoring, and visualization of microservice systems by considering service versions and risks. VMAMV can generate version‐based service dependency graphs, provide graph search services, perform consumer‐driven contract testing, and conduct a risk analysis. Besides, VMAMV can also notify users of existing anomalies and potential risks to facilitate the development and operation of microservice systems. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the VMAMV system in the detection of service anomalies, old patch versions, low‐usage service versions, the presentation of contract test results and service error chains, and the validity of risk analysis.

Web API/service technology has been attracting considerable attention and the REST (REpresentational State Transfer) architecture is now widely accepted as mainstream technology. Nonetheless, developing the means by which to discover RESTful Web APIs/services is crucial to the further development of this technology. Unfortunately, existing search engines for RESTful Web APIs/services provide only keyword-based or tag-based search functions. A failure to take into account the semantics and/or characteristics (e.g., their interface compatibility) greatly hampers the ability to find suitable APIs/services. In this study, we propose a novel approach to the discovery of RESTful Web API/services, referred to as Test-Oriented API Search with Semantic Interface Compatibility (TASSIC). This scheme involves expanding the terms of Web API/service documents based on DBpedia and WordNet. Unsuitable APIs/services are then filtered out using a systematic process, as follows: 1) calculation of semantic similarity between a set of candidate APIs/services and a user query, 2) analysis of interface compatibility between candidate APIs/services using the Hungarian Algorithm, 3) invocation of candidate APIs/services to verify functionality and availability, and 4) analysis of similarity between the actual response of the candidate services and the expected response specified in the user query. The proposed TASSIC increases the likelihood of matching APIs/services that are semantically equivalent or similar to user queries. Unit test and acceptance test are used to verify that a set of candidate APIs/services are actually available and that they actually meets user requirements. Experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of TASSIC, the accuracy of which is superior to that of existing methods.

Existing Web API search engines allow only category-based browsing and keyword- or tag-based searches for RESTful services. In other words, they do not enable the discovery or composition of real-world RESTful services by application developers. This paper outlines a novel scheme, called Transformation–Annotation–Discovery (TAD), which transforms OpenAPI (Swagger) documents related to RESTful services into a graph structure and then automatically annotates the semantic concepts on graph nodes using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and WordNet. TAD can then be used for service composition based on the user requirements specified in two modules: a service discovery chain and logical-operation-based composition. The service discovery chain uses the Hungarian algorithm to assess service interface compatibility in order to facilitate the retrieval of services capable of bridging the gap between specified user requirements and the discovered services. The logical-operation-based composition module identifies services that semantically fit the user requirements, based on the structure of the service flow. Those candidate services are then sent to service discovery chains to enable the simultaneous search for potential composition solutions. System prototype and experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed scheme.

Semantic versioning (SemVer) was widely used in the development of microservice systems to place limits on the configuration and growth of service versions. SemVer can suppress the complexity of MSAs; however, the interactions among various elements (e.g., services, endpoints, versions) remain difficult to manage. Therefore, this paper presents a tool for monitoring microservice systems, generating visualized version-based service dependency graphs, and providing graph search services. The proposed scheme is called Version-based Microservice Analysis, Monitoring, and Visualization (VMAMV). This system automatically detects potential design problems for microservice with multiple versions in design time, discover service anomalies for all service versions in runtime, and immediately notifies users of problems shortly after they occur. The conducted experiments show that VMAMV is feasible and effective on the detection of problems and anomalies for microservice development and operation.

Test case recording and playback technology, normally implemented as a test case recorder, has been widely applied in the industry. One of the key research topics is how to determine if a web page has entered a ready state before the recorder can perform the next test command? If a web element is incorrectly selected during playback, the related test command will fail to process. This research puts forward four kinds of automatic waiting mechanism for playing test commands. The experiment result shows that the waiting time can be determined dynamically and automatically, so that testers do not have to manually add waiting commands thereby reducing the time and error of artificial discrimination. The proposed mechanisms were implemented as parts of the SideeX open source web testing software and have been further adopted by the new Selenium IDE and Katalon Recorder. Currently, over 60,000 web testers around the world run the mechanisms.

Microservice architecture (MSA) is an emerging software architectural style, which differs fundamentally from the monolithic, layered architecture. MSA is based on microservices to provide several advantages, such as autonomy, composability, scalability, and fault-tolerance. However, how to manage complex "call" relationships between microservices is still a big issue that needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an approach for assisting the development of MSA-based systems, referred to as GMAT (Graph-based Microservice Analysis and Testing). GMAT can automatically generate "Service Dependency Graph (SDG)" to analyze and visualize the dependency relationships between microservices. Using GMAT, people are able to detect anomalies by analyzing risky service invocation chains in early stage of development, and trace the linkages between services when developing a new version of a target system. Experiments show that GMAT is able to work well for both small-scale and large-scale MSA-based systems.

In recent years, automated service composition has been a fervid research area in service computing. Within this area, service description plays a crucial role in terms of the development of a diverse number of automation schemes. In this paper, we provide an investigation and classification of the service description approaches that have been used in a diverse collection of automated service composition studies. To position the service description approaches used in automated service composition throughout the service description world and to clearly classify them, we propose five two-value dimensions. Using the proposed dimensions, we first perform a categorization and provide a simple introduction to current representative industrial service description standards. Subsequently, because we discovered that most of the studied automated composition approaches follow a tuple-based service description paradigm, an exhaustive classification and discussion of this paradigm is made, with the automated composition approaches adopting this paradigm as an example. Finally, we discuss issues that are currently relevant to the service description field and possible solutions. With this study, the reader can obtain a complete understanding of service description approaches used in automated service composition research, including their common formulation and assumptions.

Nowadays, smart phones have become the most important mobile devices and can access thousands of mobile applications. However, retrieving required information from various resources by the smart phone is still a time-consuming, costly and inconvenient task for users. To address this issue, we introduce the concept of service brick, and propose a service brick composition framework to integrate required services and information. Notably, the web-based framework is devised according to the characteristics of smart phones, including relatively narrow network bandwidth and relatively small size screen. Besides, a visual design tool is provided to let the user build brick-based applications easily. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, two illustrative examples, music composite app and travel composite app, are offered.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of the current status of our two-phase-eight-year nation-wide effort in improving the software engineering education in Taiwan. In the first phase of this program (2004 - 2008), the number of universities that regularly offer software engineering courses grew from 63 to 92 while the number of offered courses grew from 159 to 406. The main objective of the second phase (2010 - 2014) was set to establish and implement the core competences of software engineering in our module programs. Seven capabilities are identified to form the SE core competences, including think computationally, teamwork in software development and maintenance, build abstractions and perform problem domain decompositions, analyze and model complex systems involved various domains, develop, review and verify complex systems involved various domains, create user-friendly interfaces based on user experiences, and manage and evolve large-scale design and development efforts. Multiple actions have also been taken to enhance the core competences of students in ICT-related programs in Taiwan, including developing practical course material, holding training courses for the educators, providing onsite lecturing support, and delivering industrial-oriented practical courses.

Web service discovery is the process of locating web services to meet requirements of service requesters, and is an important ingredient in building loosely-coupled SOA-based applications. In this paper, we propose a graph-based web service matchmaking approach based on WSDL without additional meta data or annotations. We divide the service matchmaking approach into two principal themes: constructing request graphs (RG) and service signature graphs (SSG) and calculating distance and similarity between a RG and an SSG. There are three main benefits in the proposed approach: (1) the structure of a service and involved data types are considered in the matching process, (2) the providers do not need to spent considerable effort annotating the service description using tags or ontology models, and (3) both the crisp similarity and fuzzy similarity can be produced automatically.

This paper proposes an argumentation and negotiation mechanism for multi-agent systems. Through argumentations and negotiations, agents obtain more information on the topics of common interests or on those they have odds with. At the inception of the negotiation, agents can hardly understand completely the goals and beliefs other agents have toward related issues. Through argumentations and negotiations, the beliefs evolve, and agents will have better understanding about each other's target needs and preferences. During negotiations, agents can select the proposal that better suits other agents, further improving the chances for the agents to reach a consensus. Lastly, this paper illustrates our proposed methods through a simple course-scheduling negotiating system.

Service-oriented architecture implemented by Web Services is one of the most popular and promising software development paradigm that has brought some challenging research issues today. One of the most important issues is how to automate web service composition at design phase. Currently, there are many researchers concentrating on service composition problem that can be partitioned into three parts, dynamic workflow composition, QoS-aware, and transaction-aware service selection. This paper addresses the issue of automatic composing Web Services into an executable workflow not only according to user's functional requirements but also to their transactional properties and QoS characteristics. We propose an automatic composition approach through genetic algorithm to satisfy user's functional requirements, QoS criteria, and transactional requirements automatically at the same time. Experimental results are presented.

Service-Orientated Computing (SOC) has become a main trend in software engineering that promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted the researchers' attention and has been adopted industry-wide. However, service composition that enables one to aggregate existing services into a new composite service is still a highly complex and critical task in service-oriented technology. To enhance availability of composite services, we propose a discovery-based service composition framework to better integrate component services in both static and dynamic manner, including (1) to devise a notion of service availability especially for composition; (2) to develop a dynamic service composition (DSC) pattern for addressing the issues of service availability; and (3) to extend Contract Net Protocol (ECNP) to coordinate service discovery, composition and invocation based on the composite pattern. The main benefit of the proposed approach is better availability through attaching multiple candidate services for future binding.

As the number of agents increases rapidly on the Internet, discovering appropriate service agents with required capabilities for request agents becomes a crucial issue in multi-agent systems. Two major discovering approaches have been developed: centralized matchmaking approaches and distributed bidding approaches. However, the former approaches may suffer the problem of middle agent overload and can not reflect the dynamic characteristic of agent capabilities, while the later has the problems of the overhead for maintaining contact lists of service agents in each request agent and sending ineffective CFP messages to non-qualified service agents. To address the above problems, in this paper, we propose a CNP-based bidding mechanism based on Possibilistic Petri Nets that facilitates request agents to find preferred service agents. Moreover, our mechanism provides more flexible match that not only supports exact match but also takes the degree of satisfaction into account.

A number of approaches have been proposed in tackling the timetabling problem, such as operational research, human-machine interaction, constraint programming, expert systems, and neural networks. However, there are still several key challenges to be addressed: easily reformulated to support changes, a generalized framework to handle various timetabling problems, and ability to incorporate knowledge in the timetabling system. In this article, we propose an automatic software engineering approach, called task-based conceptual graphs, to addressing the challenges in the timetabling problem. Task-based conceptual graphs provide the automation of software development processes including specification, verification, and automatic programming. Maintenance can be directly performed on the specifications rather than on the source code; moreover, hard and soft constraints can be easily inserted or removed. A university timetabling system in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Central University is used as an illustrative example for the proposed approach. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 20: 1137–1160, 2005.