Abstract Requirements engineering is crucial for software development. Analyzing large sets of requirements in natural language is difficult and time-consuming, especially in Internet of Things (IoT) projects, where heterogeneous devices, services, communication infrastructures, and environmental constraints increase the complexity of the requirements. In this context, clustering can support requirements analysis by organizing functional requirements into semantically coherent groups that represent the same functional aspect or subsystem. This helps analysts reduce manual effort, identify relationships and dependencies between requirements, structure large sets of requirements, and better understand system responsibilities and specific IoT concerns. For these reasons, we propose ReqCluster4IoT, a method for clustering functional requirements in IoT applications. The method builds on a focused exploration of the literature to identify IoT characteristics, along with experiments on requirement classification and text semantic similarity. We evaluated the method’s acceptance and usefulness through an online questionnaire and a focus group. The online questionnaire collected feedback from 10 IoT software developers, whereas the focus group provided more in-depth insights into the method’s results. Findings suggest that ReqCluster4IoT can capture meaningful relationships among requirements and generate clusters that practitioners perceive as useful. Additionally, the method helps practitioners identify how related functionalities are organized into clusters, reveal relationships among requirements, and associate each cluster with IoT-specific characteristics, thereby supporting requirements analysis, implementation planning, and requirements management. Overall, participants reported positive acceptance of the method regarding its usefulness, its potential to reduce effort, and their intention to use it.

Context: The popularity of microservices architecture has grown due to its ability to address monolithic architecture issues, such as limited scalability, hard maintenance, and technological dependence. Nonetheless, the migration of monolith systems to microservices is complex. Therefore, methodologies and techniques are needed to facilitate migration and support practitioners and software architects. Objective: The objective of this study is to investigate cases of application migration, microservices identification techniques, tools used during migration, factors that promote migration, as well as issues and benefits of the migration. Method: We have conducted this SMS following the guidelines established by Kitchenham and Petersen. The research objective was defined using part of the Goal-Question-Metric model and the Population, Intervention, and Outcome criteria. From 1546 studies that were retrieved from the search execution , 114 were selected and analyzed to answer the research questions. Results: This SMS contributes with (i) a migration process proposal based on migration cases, (ii) a characterization of migration techniques based on different criteria, (iii) an analysis of tools to support migration, (iv) the identification of migration drivers, and (v) an exploration of migration issues as well as benefits. Conclusion: This SMS sheds light on the complexity and variability of migrating monolithic systems to microservices, as well as the limited number of migration tools. While scalability and maintenance drive migration, few studies assess them. Key challenges include microservices communication and database migration , with most research focusing primarily on monolith decomposition. Despite these difficulties, migration offers benefits, particularly in scalability and maintainability .

ABSTRACT For more than a decade, software engineering for systems‐of‐systems (SoS) and software ecosystems (SECO) has been largely investigated in order to cope with complexity in software‐intensive systems. SoS research addresses several aspects related to software system architecture comprising a set of constituent systems that relate to each other to perform missions. As such, SoS have key characteristics such as operational and managerial independence, distribution, emergent behavior, and evolutionary development. Full interoperability and dynamic architecture become critical challenges in this context. On the hand, SECO research refers to modeling and analysis of a socio‐technical network of actors and artifacts formed on top of common technological platforms, in which business factors directly influence software maintenance and evolution. Software sustainability and diversity as well as quality attributes that affect the SECO platform health represent challenges in the field. From the long‐running, successful series of the International Workshop on Software Engineering for systems‐of‐systems and Software Ecosystems (SESoS), co‐located with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), we present this special issue on the topics in the Journal of Software: Evolution and Process from SESoS 2023 in Melbourne, Australia. Four articles were accepted and published in this special issue, covering a longitudinal analysis of SoS research, as well as strategic patterns, services, and trust in SECO. These articles provide researchers and practitioners with advances in the state of the art and point out opportunities for further research.

The software ecosystem strategy dominated the digital games industry. The leading game companies adopted ecosystem dynamics, forcing external actors (or developers) to adapt to a highly competitive scenario. Given the Brazilian digital games industry's growth, this study aims to characterize and understand the game software ecosystem scenario. We conducted an online survey research to identify positives, negatives, and opportunities from different ecosystem actors. The survey received 200 responses from different actors from both industry and academia. Three researchers applied qualitative analysis procedures to extract codes and relationships from the answers. We identify twelve aspects (i.e., network, financial sustainability, market opportunity etc.) and their relationships that describe the Brazilian ecosystem. We also investigated these aspects in three analysis groups (i.e., positives, negatives, and opportunities) and compared them against the Brazilian games censuses. Next, we classified codes based on the software ecosystem dimensions (i.e., technical, business, and social) to point out research needs. The codes' relationships allowed us to understand some concerns about the Brazilian context. The qualitative analysis procedures and the discussion on the software ecosystem dimensions provide an overview of a complex scenario, including a list of aspects to support further academic research and industrial techniques.

Abstract Software Ecosystem (SECO) comprises third‐party developers cooperating and competing when contributing to a platform provided by a central organization (keystone). There are keystones investing in Developer Relations (DevRel) internal team as a global business strategy to attract and engage a critical mass of third‐party developers in producing and evolving contributions. For this reason, the DevRel team should promote social relationships among SECO actors and synergy among keystone' goals and developers' expectations to survive to inherit changes. However, the understanding of DevRel structure and the way DevRel team can act on a SECO to better engage the developers' communities establishing a robust VCN (Value Creation Network) remain a challenge. In this article, we advance on the structure for developers' governance from DevRel by proposing and refining a model because of the following research methods: grey literature review, opinion survey, and interviews. The model is called DevGo (DEVeloper GOVernance) and consists of four focus areas, three developer advancement phases, six stages, enablers, and value transfer objects. In addition, a set of 62 lessons learned from DevRel practitioners is associated with DevGo stages.

Over the years, several Parallel Programming Models (PPMs) have supported the abstraction of programming complexity for parallel computer systems. However, few studies aim to evaluate the productivity reached by such abstractions since this is a complex task that involves human beings. There are several studies to develop predictive methods to estimate the effort required to develop software applications. In order to evaluate the reliability of such metrics, it is necessary to assess the accuracy in different programming paradigms. In this work, we used the data of an experiment conducted with beginners in parallel programming to determine the effort required for implementing stream parallelism using FastFlow, SPar, and TBB. Our results show that some traditional software effort estimation models, such as COCOMO II, fall short. In contrast, Planning Poker could contribute toward a parallel-aware effort model.

The development of smart cities requires a broad digital network, technology infrastructure, services, creativity and innovation. These are all important components of an ecosystem that offers a better quality of life to society. However, to develop systems to be part of the smart city, it is necessary to understand the challenges and opportunities involved on it, especially the informal systems that are used by citizens and do not belong to the formal structure of public administration. Informal systems are created to meet the needs of citizens. As such, this work aims to present challenges and opportunities identified in this scenario. The method adopted to increase information on this topic was an online survey research. As a result, “transport” was highlighted as the most cited opportunity and “lack of investment” as the most cited challenge to be overcome according to the participants. As a contribution, a discussion about the results is carried out and allows the analysis of the identified opportunities and challenges so that professionals can take advantage and develop systems that citizens recognize as necessary to make a smart city.

From the popularization of multi-core architectures, several parallel APIs have emerged, helping to abstract the programming complexity and increasing productivity in application development. Unfortunately, only a few research efforts in this direction managed to show the usability pay-back of the programming abstraction created, because it is not easy and poses many challenges for conducting empirical software engineering. We believe that coding metrics commonly used in software engineering code measurements can give useful indicators on the programming effort of parallel applications and APIs. These metrics were designed for general purposes without considering the evaluation of applications from a specific domain. In this study, we aim to evaluate the feasibility of seven coding metrics to be used in the parallel programming domain. To do so, five stream processing applications implemented with different parallel APIs for multi-cores were considered. Our experiments have shown COCOMO II is a suitable model for evaluating the productivity of different parallel APIs targeting multi-cores on stream processing applications while other metrics are restricted to the code size.

Large software-intensive systems have emerged in several application domains, such as healthcare, transportation, smart environments, and Industry 4.0. Sometimes referred to as Systems-of-Systems (SoS) and resulted from the integration of various heterogeneous and independent software systems, such large systems lead to high dynamism and often operate in critical and uncertain environments. Hence, the reliability of these systems must be a concern, but traditional reliability approaches fail to cope with such high dynamism and uncertainty. Thus, new solutions are required to ensure the reliability of SoS. Moreover, there is a lack of studies that investigate the reliability of SoS. This paper presents the state of the art of the way that the reliability of SoS has been addressed. After investigating the literature, we selected 27 studies to perform a detailed analysis regarding factors that affect the reliability of SoS and approaches and metrics to improve it. We found an area still gaining maturity with researchers working in isolation and mainly developing solutions for domain-specific problems. There are still various critical open issues, while SoS have been increasingly adopted as a suitable and integrated solution in critical domains.

Critical issues in the Oil & Gas business have been discussed in social media, involving policymakers, oil and gas companies, industry individuals, and civic activists. As observed recently, such issues have a critical role in the economic debate and political polarization. In this context, this paper reports on a study for the detection of hidden communities and influential users on social networks through the analysis of Twitter posts during Brazil mega oil fields auction in 2019. We use a methodology focused on identifying relevant users for the target community and discovering the effects of interactions between interest groups based on the modeling of the oil and gas social network. Firstly, we applied a standard community detection algorithm called Louvain method. Next, we used the Herfindahl-Hirschman index to identify the most influential users in the network by measuring the distribution of users' influence in a community. As a result, it was possible to visualize the presence of clusters and specific topics of interest shared by the most influential communities. Moreover, it was also possible to distinguish the convergent and divergent opinions that permeated the pre-salt auction and the level of Twitter engagement of key players from the global energy market.

Systems used by an organization to achieve business objectives are supported by technologies included in its technological platform, creating a software ecosystem (SECO). Modifications on these technologies can lead essential systems to lose performance or support. Thus, IT managers and architects should pay attention while making changes by not only accounting for information on technologies, but also considering their relationships. Such information may be spread in different documents and also difficult to analyze mostly due to the organizational complexity and lack of tooling support. The purpose of this work is to assist IT managers and architects in making decisions as regards to IT architecture modification, i.e., the set of technologies that supports products and services of an organization. Firstly, critical factors for maintaining IT architecture were investigated through a systematic mapping and a survey research. As a result, an approach to support technology assessment and analysis was defined, exploring the network structure that represents the organization's ecosystem. A tool implementing the key features of the proposed approach was developed, including visualization of SECO networks and configuration of well-defined criteria. Finally, both the approach and tool were evaluated through a feasibility study on the technology and concepts acceptance within a specific, real scenario. A positive feedback on the approach's relevance and tool's resources was observed.

Software Ecosystem (SECO) comprises third-party developers cooperating and competing when contributing to a platform provided by a central organization (keystone). A keystone has invested in a Developer Relations (DevRel) internal team as a global business strategy to attract and engage a critical mass of third-party developers in producing and evolving contributions. For this reason, the DevRel team should promote social relationships among SECO actors and synergy among keystone' goals and developers' expectations. It can help to establish and sustain a competitive value creation network (VCN) within a SECO that must survive to inherit changes. However, it is still a challenge the way DevRel team can act on a SECO to better engage the developers' communities aiming to establish a robust VCN. In this paper, we advance on investigating the perceptions of 31 DevRel practitioners from large, medium and small-size companies based on seven countries about value creation in DevRel. We found 55 elements of value creation distributed in retention, efficiency, innovation, and complementarity. Based on our analysis, we contribute with a set of seven insights (feedback loop, loyalty program, roadmap enhancement, technical training, processes restructuring, innovative products, cost reducing) and a DevRel VCN that involves elements, suppliers and consumers. It fosters a common perspective for DevRel practitioners, keystones and researchers for designing strategies and a research roadmap.

There are several challenges to support healthcare context; however, it is necessary to investigate a current reality in the Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS) field: the incorporation of emergent systems. This paper presents a review on how emergent systems have been investigated in last decade in the context of CBMS conference series. Results show that CBMS strategies should consider that these systems cannot be treated as something simple and that a deepest analysis can show its real complexity.

A social innovation ecosystem is a set of actors from different societal sectors and their environments with legal and cultural norms, supportive infrastructures and many other elements, which enable or inhibit the development of social innovations. In this context, several issues regarding information reuse and integration can be found. In this paper, we present an observational study where a real case of an emerging social innovation ecosystem was modeled and analyzed in order to identify the challenges faced by the actors. Results show the importance of adopting digital ecosystem concepts for an approach in which social innovation actors interact and collaborate through the support provided by a common technological platform, composing what we called as Social Innovation Digital Ecosystem (SIDE). Such approach aims to support social innovation actors towards fostering collaboration, co-creation, knowledge, and information sharing and reuse, enabling the development, dissemination and generation of more effective social innovations.

Software-intensive systems have become increasingly ubiquitous, large, and complex, with dissemination in several application domains and tightly dependent upon different technologies. Such systems are usually centered in a software platform so that increasing attention has been paid to influence and interdependency in relationships among all the involved players, forming software ecosystems (SECO). Despite the initial advances in SECO research, few analytical models, case studies with real data, and integrated tool support exist. A great barrier for the evolution of the field towards aiding decision-making in the real industry is the gap lack in theof SECO modeling support. In this paper, we aim to perform an exploratory study on the need for modeling in the SECO field. We preliminarily identified some modeling elements from the SECO literature and explored them in the context of a real SECO in the educational domain.

Organizations open up their software platforms and reusable assets to others, including partners and third-party developers around the world, creating software ecosystems (SECOs). It can contribute to minimize nontechnical barriers of software reuse in industry because it explores potential benefits from the relations among companies and stakeholders. An inhibitor is the complexity in defining value for reusable assets in a scenario where producers try to meet customers' expectations, and vice-versa. This paper presents a value-based mechanism to support component negotiation and socialization processes in a reuse repository in the SECO context as an extension of the Brechó-EcoSys environment. Social resources were integrated into the mechanism in order to aid component negotiation. An evaluation of the negotiation mechanism was performed, based on an analysis of its elements and functions against critical factors in the negotiation within a SECO, identified in a previous systematic literature review. In addition, an analysis of the social resources supporting the negotiation mechanism was performed against popular sociotechnical elements for SECOs, identified in a previous survey with experts in the field.

This paper presents a preliminary communication maturity model named C2M. The C2M model aims to help organizations to identify the maturity of communication-related aspects and processes providing a tool to reveal what practices need to be improved. The model is composed of three maturity areas respectively organized into factors, goals, and practices. It has been preliminarily evaluated in two steps. First, two focus group meetings were conducted in two organizations aiming to identify how fit the model is to attend its purpose. Second, a diagnosis activity was conducted in two organizations aiming to observe how the model is perceived when used in practice. The experts who participated in the diagnosis activity reported that the application of the model allowed them to become aware of communication issues their teams were facing that they had no knowledge of. Their positive feedback is an initial indication that the model is fit to point out the maturity of communication processes and practices in distributed software projects.

In a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO), the central organization (keystone), must restructure processes to aid external developers to produce mobile applications.The external developer helps the keystone to reach goals, such as growing number of mobile applications.However, there is no process in this context to support developers in the development aligned with the keystone's goals.This paper presents MSECO-DEV, a process to support external developers in reaching keystone's goals by developing mobile applications.MSECO-DEV comprises 8 activities, 7 artifacts, 8 recommendations, and 17 practices.Activities, recommendations, and practices were evaluated by 65 Brazilian developers (experts and novices).Such developers acted within the main MSECOs (Android, iOS and Windows Phone) to assess their benefits for the mobile applications development routine.As result, we stated that developers have difficulties to perform marketing activities, as well as to find materials that support development.Practices, activities, and recommendations were also evolved and adjusted for the definition of MSECO-DEV.

The development of mobile applications around a central software platform has been impacting the software industry. Software solutions are collaboratively built within a dynamic market, often requiring adaptation of software development processes. This trend has been broadly studied as Software Ecosystem (SECO) - in the mobile platform domain, named as Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). In this paper, we share the results of a systematic mapping study on the MSECO field that analyzed 28 papers identified as relevant to answer our research questions. The results indicate the growing interest in this research field as well as the main software platforms and trending topics. We confirmed the three main MSECOs as Android (Google), iOS (Apple) and Windows Phone (Microsoft). We observed the more investigated area is mobile app development. Finally, we highlighted the main benefits: the attracting and supporting developers, then helping developers to learn and create content and the app store that allows selling and buying processes.

This paper's main goal is to structure an initial research on the Software Ecosystem (SECO) field, regarding the so called CAMSS (Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Social and Security) and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies. Our main goal is to share our first ideas and some observations we have been conducting in an empirical way. As such, Cloud SECOs bring the ecosystem environment to another level, with new challenges in all three dimensions: technology, social and business. Besides that, we have been observing a possible shift in the center of some SECOs, i.e., Those "things" connected to the Internet have introduced new players - at least in the sense they interact with the environment by providing data. As new software architectures and technologies emerge to support the new scenario being drawn, our research tries to characterize this new ecosystem and identify challenges, providing a roadmap that could help new entrants.

Software Ecosystem (SECO) is often understood as a set of actors interacting among themselves and manipulating artifacts with the support of a common technology platform. SECO can represent an environment in which the component repository is gathering stakeholders, and software products and components. By manipulating software artifacts, a technical network emerges from component repositories that support Software Reuse. Those repositories often lack resources to support actors' relationships. Introducing social resources in SECO aims at stimulating actors' interactions, information exchange and better understanding on how artifacts are manipulated in such social relations. In this paper, we focus on investigating SECO representing component repositories that include socio-technical resources. A survey with experts was planned and executed. The goal was to identify the relevance of each resource for a SECO based on component repositories, initially focused on the Brazilian scenario. This paper also describes the analysis of the data collected in this survey. Some information of other SECO elements extracted from the data is also presented, e.g., the participants' profile and how they behave within a SECO.

The essence of the software ecosystem concept encourages external developers to interact with a software platform, enabling them to contribute or evolve such platform. Trying to expand a product into a platform on which components, services and applications can be created, a company may provide the basis for an ecosystem and its life cycle. In this paper, we describe the evolution process of an application towards an ecosystem using current models and taking into account the reuse of an existing software system. The application DiaDia has been developed for smartphones and its main function consists in helping the treatment of diabetic patients. Two different models are used to discuss the transition of the application to an ecosystem: one is an adaptation of the Software Supply Network which represents the main actors that interact with the ecosystem, and the other covers the process of creating an application and its evolution to an ecosystem through Business Process Model and Notation.

Considering the Computer Science challenge related to quality in technology development, the teaching and learning process of Software Engineering (SE) takes an important role because it impacts the formation of human resources. However, SE does not explore the broader development and use of didactic material such as games. These resources can propitiate an experience that reflects typical situations of real world and motivate students. This paper presents UbiRE, a game to understand Requirements Engineering in the context of ubiquitous systems. Its design, development and initial evaluation experience is discussed from a development process of educational game perspective, contributing to improve this process in the SE education scenario.

Software Ecosystems (SECOs) have emerged as an approach to improve Software Engineering (SE) in industry considering relations among companies and stakeholders. Companies have opened up their platforms and artifacts to others, including partners and third-part developers. Thus, systems architecture, businesses and social networks should be understood in an integrated way. This concern motivated an initial proposal of a framework for SECOs engineering in order to outline a set of steps that combines three different dimensions of SECOs and joins different perspectives in SECOs research literature through a survey. In this paper, the focus is on the second dimension, business. A preliminary analysis carried out on a Software Reuse Lab's SECO at COPPE/UFRJ points out that concepts explored by researchers can be merged in a broader SE approach.