Abstract Architecture recovery tools help software engineers obtain an overview of the structure of their software systems during all phases of the software development life cycle. This is especially important for microservice applications because they consist of multiple interacting microservices, which makes it more challenging to oversee the architecture. Various tools and techniques for architecture recovery (also called architecture reconstruction) have been presented in academic and gray literature sources, but no overview and comparison of their accuracy exists. This paper presents the results of a multivocal literature review with the goal of identifying architecture recovery tools for microservice applications and a comparison of the identified tools’ architectural recovery accuracy. We focused on static tools since they can be integrated into fast-paced CI/CD pipelines. 13 such tools were identified from the literature and nine of them could be executed and compared on their capability of detecting different system characteristics. The best-performing tool exhibited an overall F1-score of 0.86. Additionally, the possibility of combining multiple tools to increase the recovery correctness was investigated, yielding a combination of four individual tools that achieves an F1-score of 0.91.

In the era of 6G, developing and managing software requires cutting-edge software engineering (SE) theories and practices tailored for such complexity across a vast number of connected edge devices. Our project aims to lead the development of sustainable methods and energy-efficient orchestration models specifically for edge environments, enhancing architectural support driven by AI for contemporary edge-to-cloud continuum computing. This initiative seeks to position Finland at the forefront of the 6G landscape, focusing on sophisticated edge orchestration and robust software architectures to optimize the performance and scalability of edge networks. Collaborating with leading Finnish universities and companies, the project emphasizes deep industry-academia collaboration and international expertise to address critical challenges in edge orchestration and software architecture, aiming to drive significant advancements in software productivity and market impact.

Researchers in the microservices community often resort to demonstrating the impact of their proposed advancements on custom-made microservices projects. This is a possible source of bias that can reduce the trustworthiness of the results. Moreover, it is hard to compare advances in small projects, often developed due to lack of time. It is common across disciplines to recognize benchmarks that mitigate bias and unify the advancements' impact. To facilitate the identification of available open-source microservice projects (OSS-MS), we performed a comprehensive study to identify, curate, and catalog OSS-MS. We started with 389559 projects and filtered them down to 3804 projects that we manually labeled. After manual labeling, our dataset contains 378 projects with three or more microservices and with over 100 commits. We document the projects from many perspectives, including project size, platform, number of contributors, project purpose, and foundation support. This dataset can serve researchers as a roadmap to identify benchmarks, as our dataset can be used to answer questions such as whether the number of services impacts the issue count.

Coping with the rapid growing complexity in contemporary software architecture, tracing has become an increasingly critical practice and been adopted widely by software engineers. By adopting tracing tools, practitioners are able to monitor, debug, and optimize distributed software architectures easily. However, with excessive number of valid candidates, researchers and practitioners have a hard time finding and selecting the suitable tracing tools by systematically considering their features and advantages. To such a purpose, this paper aims to provide an overview of popular Open tracing tools via comparison. Herein, we first identified 30 tools in an objective, systematic, and reproducible manner adopting the Systematic Multivocal Literature Review protocol. Then, we characterized each tool looking at the (1) measured features, (2) popularity both in peer-reviewed literature and online media, and (3) benefits and issues. As a result, this paper presents a systematic comparison amongst the selected tracing tools in terms of their features, popularity, benefits and issues. The result mainly shows that each tracing tool provides a unique combination of features with also different pros and cons. The contribution of this paper is to provide the practitioners better understanding of the tracing tools facilitating their adoption.

Software vulnerabilities play a major role, as there are multiple risks associated, including loss and manipulation of private data. The software engineering research community has been contributing to the body of knowledge by proposing several empirical studies on vulnerabilities and automated techniques to detect and remove them from source code. The reliability and generalizability of the findings heavily depend on the quality of the information mineable from publicly available datasets of vulnerabilities as well as on the availability and suitability of those databases. In this paper, we seek to understand the anatomy of the currently available vulnerability databases through a systematic mapping study where we analyze (1) what are the popular vulnerability databases adopted; (2) what are the goals for adoption; (3) what are the other sources of information adopted; (4) what are the methods and techniques; (5) which tools are proposed. An improved understanding of these aspects might not only allow researchers to take informed decisions on the databases to consider when doing research but also practitioners to establish reliable sources of information to inform their security policies and standards.

Companies develop cloud-native systems deployed on public and private clouds. Since private clouds have limited resources, the systems should run efficiently by keeping performance related anomalies under control. The goal of this work is to understand whether a set of five performance-related KPIs depends on the metrics collected at runtime by Kafka, Zookeeper, and other tools (168 different metrics). We considered four weeks worth of runtime data collected from a system running in production. We trained eight Machine Learning algorithms on three weeks worth of data and tested them on one week’s worth of data to compare their prediction accuracy and their training and testing time. It is possible to detect performance-related anomalies with a very high level of accuracy (higher than 95% AUC) and with very limited training time (between 8 and 17 minutes). Machine Learning algorithms can help to identify runtime anomalies and to detect them efficiently. Future work will include the identification of a proactive approach to recognize the root cause of the anomalies and to prevent them as early as possible.

Developing an AI-based system is uniquely challenging as it requires knowledge across multiple domains. Though the project team is required to be versatile, it is possible that their repertoire cannot cover all of the requirements of the system, which results in damage to the software quality. Therefore, it is critical to have an effective team knowledge management (KM) strategy to detect the valuable “unknown”, optimize the “known” task assignment, and enlarge the team knowledge base. Moreover, it is more effective to support the process with data-driven approaches.

Open Source Software (OSS) is nowadays used and integrated in most of the commercial products. However, the selection of OSS projects for integration is not a simple process, mainly due to a of lack of clear selection models and lack of information from the OSS portals. We investigate the factors and metrics that practitioners currently consider when selecting OSS. We also investigate the source of information and portals that can be used to assess the factors, as well as the possibility to automatically extract such information with APIs. We elicited the factors and the metrics adopted to assess and compare OSS performing a survey among 23 experienced developers who often integrate OSS in the software they develop. Moreover, we investigated the APIs of the portals adopted to assess OSS extracting information for the most starred 100K projects in GitHub. We identified a set consisting of 8 main factors and 74 sub-factors, together with 170 related metrics that companies can use to select OSS to be integrated in their software projects. Unexpectedly, only a small part of the factors can be evaluated automatically, and out of 170 metrics, only 40 are available, of which only 22 returned information for all the 100K projects. Therefore, we recommend project maintainers and project repositories to pay attention to provide information for the project they are hosting, so as to increase the likelihood of being adopted. OSS selection can be partially automated, by extracting the information needed for the selection from portal APIs. OSS producers can benefit from our results by checking if they are providing all the information commonly required by potential adopters. Developers can benefit from our results, using the list of factors we selected as a checklist during the selection of OSS, or using the APIs we developed to automatically extract the data from OSS projects.

The user reviews of mobile apps are important assets that reflect the users' needs and complaints about particular apps regarding features, usability, and designs. From investigating the content of such reviews, the app developers can acquire useful information guiding the future maintenance and evolution work. Previous studies on opinion mining in mobile app reviews have provided various approaches to eliciting such critical information. A particular update of an app can provide changes to the app that result in users' reversed opinions, as well as, specific new complaints or praises. However, limited studies focus on eliciting the user opinions regarding a particular mobile app update, or the impact the update imposes. In this paper, we propose a method for systematically studying and analyzing the evolution of the users' opinions taking into consideration a set of mobile app updates. For doing so, we compare the topics appearing in the users' reviews before and after the updates. We also validate the method with an experiment on an existing mobile app.

The Mobility Requirements Engineering Tool (MoRE) is designed to facilitate the requirement analysis process of mobile app development towards the enhancement of mobile app mobility. The tool contains features of scenario creation and management, contexts and ways of interaction analysis and specification, as well as requirements change management.

Good software development and particularly maintenance practices form an important factor for success in software business. If one wants to constantly produce new successful releases of the applications, a proper efficient software maintenance process is the key. In this work, we study data from mobile application maintenance to understand and conceptualize how mobile application maintenance takes place. Based on the data on release history, we deduce different mobile application maintenance models from the perspectives of maintenance scheduling and maintenance requirements.