Abstract Whenever an emergency occurs, such as a change in the system operating environment that prevents regular functioning, one possibility to restore the system to normal operation is to perform immediately the emergency repair process (ERP). This paper introduces the feature‐based emergency repair process (FbERP), which constitutes a feature‐based improvement/extension to ERP. FbERP uses feature models to represent urgent change requests (UCRs) and traces each change to its location in the code base in order to realign documentation and code. Based on real‐world change requests, we evaluated the proposed process using different techniques, including an empirical case study and a small survey. In the empirical case study, we compare FbERP with respect to ERP to check the effectiveness, efficiency, and usability of the proposed process. The results of the evaluation reveal that FbERP can be successfully used by software engineers to respond to UCRs, with an improvement over ERP.

This paper presents an approach on entrepreneurship education which helps to turn ideas into Minimum Viable Products (MVP) and to capacitate students to become entrepreneurs. In this approach, we integrate development and management project to different business models. Students acquire, in addition to technical competencies, skills on market knowledge and business modeling. This approach has been applied for several years in an informatics engineering course and suggests a set of activities on 18 weeks. Teachers’ perceptions and students’ opinions were collected through direct observations and using a questionnaire in order to evaluate the process behind this pedagogical project which goes beyond the walls of the university. Most of the students are satisfied with the process since they develop projects that have a good fit with the market needs and opportunities and some of them are close to creating a startup.

The robustness of the object detection methods has seen an increasing attention, which leads to a desire for more control over the training and testing phases. In practice, the need for labelling unique objects present on a dataset can be of help. However, manually labelling datasets of considerable size can be impractical. This paper describes an approach to improve labelling information of a dataset by supporting an object reidentification task. The primary objective is to find repeated objects in the dataset. The proposed solution relies on a web-based application that allows the user to choose which of the similar objects returned by the Triplet-ReID method are in fact the same as the query object. The effectiveness of the method was tested on a dataset with considerable object variability. Experimental results show a viable sorting performance associated with considerable speed improvement when compared to a traditional labelling approach. In fact, a dataset with 55 unique objects in a total of 1098 images would take 18 hours with a traditional tool and 12 hours with proposed one. Moreover, given the generic architecture of the developed framework, it can certainly be applied to a wide range of use cases.

In the last years, organizations and companies in general have found the true potential value of collecting and using data for supporting decision-making. As a consequence, data are being collected at an unprecedented rate. This poses several challenges, including, for example, regarding the storage and processing of these data. Machine Learning (ML) is also not an exception, in the sense that algorithms must now deal with novel challenges, such as learn from streaming data or deal with concept drift. ML engineers also have a harder task when it comes to selecting the most appropriate model, given the wealth of algorithms and possible configurations that exist nowadays. At the same time, training time is a stronger restriction as the computational complexity of the training model increases. In this paper we propose a framework for dealing with these challenges, based on meta-learning. Specifically, we tackle two well-defined problems: automatic algorithm selection and continuous algorithm updates that do not require the retraining of the whole algorithm to adapt to new data. Results show that the proposed framework can contribute to ameliorate the identified issues.

Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps ensure the industrial relevance of academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners in the community believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE) research is relatively low, creating a barrier between research and practice. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to explore and characterize the state of IAC with respect to industrial needs, developed solutions, impacts of the projects and also a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study. To address the above goal, we conducted an opinion survey among researchers and practitioners with respect to their experience in IAC. Our dataset includes 101 data points from IAC projects conducted in 21 different countries. Our findings include: (1) the most popular topics of the IAC projects, in the dataset, are: software testing, quality, process, and project managements; (2) over 90% of IAC projects result in at least one publication; (3) almost 50% of IACs are initiated by industry, busting the myth that industry tends to avoid IACs; and (4) 61% of the IAC projects report having a positive impact on their industrial context, while 31% report no noticeable impacts or were “not sure”. To improve this situation, we present evidence-based recommendations to increase the success of IAC projects, such as the importance of testing pilot solutions before using them in industry. This study aims to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, and benefit researchers and practitioners. Using the data and evidence presented in this paper, they can conduct more successful IAC projects in SE by being aware of the challenges and how to overcome them, by applying best practices (patterns), and by preventing anti-patterns.

Tertiary education increasingly relies on publications. Arguably, Ph.D. work is also increasingly produced within larger teams or with more extensive collaborations. As way to obtain an objective measure of this trend, this manuscript examines authorship trends in IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE-IES) publications for the 50-year period from 1963 to 2012. We emphasize the trends related to the number of authors and pages per publication. In order to identify several bibliometric indicators, we have analyzed 34,409 entries from IEEE- Xplore digital library for IEEE- IES publications. We provide results for two different sets of publications. Firstly, we present evidence that the number of authors and the number of pages of articles in the IEEE Transactions in Industrial Electronics (TIE) for the 50-year period are increasing per decade an average of +0.42 authors and +0.87 pages, respectively. Secondly, we provide evidence that the number of authors per article in 14 publication venues for the 25-year period from 1988 to 2012 are increasing per decade an average of +0.375 authors.

Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) in software engineering (SE) research is still relatively low, compared to the amount of activity in each of the two communities. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to exploratory characterize the state of IAC with respect to a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review study. To address the above goal, we gathered the opinions of researchers and practitioners w.r.t. their experiences in IAC projects. Our dataset includes 47 opinion data points related to a large set of projects conducted in 10 different countries. We aim to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, for the benefit of researchers and practitioners in conducting future successful IAC projects in SE. As an output, the study presents a set of empirical findings and evidence-based recommendations to increase the success of IAC projects.

Requirement prioritization is a process that allows selection of the “key” candidate requirements, the ones that are the most important for the construction of quality and cost-controlled software. Requirement prioritization brings certain issues and challenges related with the different stakeholders involved in the project, as well as with the prioritization techniques used, which differ in procedures, criteria and metrics. This manuscript compares two multi-criteria decision methods (MCDM), AHP and ELECTRE I, seeking to justify which one is the most feasible in the requirement prioritization process of a real-world case study. To accomplish this aim, several criteria were used to compare the applicability and performance of both MCDMs. In order to reflect reality as close as possible, several stakeholders, including software professionals directly related to the case study, were involved. The results confirm the intuition that ELECTRE I is more easily applicable than AHP. ELECTRE I is subject to fewer mistakes in comparisons of the requirements than the AHP method, as these are carried out differently. In fact, due to its inherent complexity, AHP becomes even impractical in software projects with a large number of requirements.

Devising a course for software professionals working in industry depends on several factors. In order to create a course that fulfils professionals' expectations, it is important to take account of the skills of the participants, the time available, and the specific topics to be covered. This paper presents the curriculum of a course in requirements engineering and management intended for software developers with a first-level academic degree in computing and experience in developing real software solutions. This context requires the course to concentrate on topics that were not taught in the participants' previous education and that can have a positive impact on their daily practices.

A scenario can be used to describe a possible instantiation of a given business use case and can be expressed for example as a list of steps written in natural language, or by an interaction diagram. This paper discusses how a collection of scenarios, all expressed as UML2 sequence diagrams, can be described for validation purposes by a single model, written in the Coloured Petri Nets (CPN)modelling language. Due to the support for parallelism given by the CPN language, the obtained CPN model can: (1) simultaneously execute several scenarios; and (2) elegantly represent the parallel activities inside a scenario. This two-level parallelism is crucial during validation, since it allows one to detect problems that are only evident when several scenarios are in simultaneous execution and may affect each other. We exemplify our approach in a system that has a rich set of interactions with its users.

Abstract This paper describes a refactoring process that transforms a Java source code base into a functionally equivalent AspectJ source code base. The process illustrates the use of a collection of refactorings for aspect‐oriented source code, covering the extraction of scattered implementation elements to aspects, the internal reorganization of the extracted aspects and the extraction of commonalities to super‐aspects. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a model-based approach to requirements engineering for reactive systems; we use an elevator controller as case study. We identify and justify two key properties that a model which we construct must have, namely: (1) controller-and-environment-partitioned, which means constituting a description of both the controller and the environment, and distinguishing between these two domains and between desired and assumed behaviour; (2) use case-based, which means constructed on the basis of a given use case diagram and reproducing the behaviour described in accompanying scenario descriptions. For the case study, we build an executable model in the formal modelling language coloured Petri nets. We demonstrate how this model is useful for requirements engineering, since it provides a solid basis for addressing behavioural issues early in the development process, for example regarding concurrent execution of use cases and handling of failures.

The main aim of this paper is to present how to derive logical software architectures for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) applications using a specific technique called 4SRS. In this technique, a component diagram, which is obtained through transformations of use cases, is used to represent the logical software architecture. To show that the 4SRS technique, which was initially devised for behavior-intensive reactive systems, is also effective and gives seamless results for other software domains, it is being experimented on data processing systems, which typically follow a CRUD pattern. For demonstration purposes, the FPL tower interface system, which is responsible for communication between air traffic control operators and flight data processing system on airports of Portugal, has been used as a case study.

This paper presents and discusses the syllabus of a second cycle degree on Software Engineering in which any student that finishes any undergraduate Computing degree (Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, and Software Engineering) can enroll. In the first year, the degree is composed of two 30-ECTS modules, one dedicated to software analysis and design and the other devoted to software quality and management. Each module is composed of five curricular units, being one of them dedicated to the experimental integration of the module's topics. The second year allows two different paths to be followed by the students. The professional path includes a 30-ECTS industrial project, while in the scientific path students must write a 45-ECTS master dissertation. The degree is mainly structured to consider the Bologna Declaration that is now being used in Europe to recast all university degrees. Additionally, we also considered the Software Engineering 2004 Curriculum Guidelines and the Knowledge Areas described in the SWEBOK.

This paper describes a refactoring process transforming a Java code base into an AspectJ equivalent. The process illustrates 17 aspect-oriented refactorings covering extraction of implementation elements to aspects, internal reorganization of extracted aspects, and extraction of commonalities to superaspects.