User feedback is imperative in improving software quality. In this paper, we explore the rich set of user feedback available for third party mobile applications as a way to extract new/changed requirements for next versions. A potential problem using this data is its volume and the time commitment involved in extracting new/changed requirements. Our goal is to alleviate part of the process through automatic topic extraction. We process user comments to extract the main topics mentioned as well as some sentences representative of those topics. This information can be useful for requirements engineers to revise the requirements for next releases. Our approach relies on adapting information retrieval techniques including topic modeling and evaluating them on different publicly available data sets. Results show that the automatically extracted topics match the manually extracted ones, while also significantly decreasing the manual effort.

An emerging class of end-user programming is the assembly of flow-based applications from a set of reusable components. Testing has become a major challenge, as a very large number of flows can be assembled from a set of components with the expectation of functioning correctly. Faults in assembled flows can create dissatisfaction among users and thereby potentially undermine this end-user programming paradigm We approach this problem as a flow-selection problem, and are interested in ways of testing a subset of flows that provide a high likelihood of revealing faults. We describe a number of flow-selection strategies, which run in the context of a flow pattern, a specification mechanism that constrains the space of assemble-able flows. We evaluate the different strategies on real-world flow patterns in terms of efficiency, i.e., the reduction of flows to test, and effectiveness, measuring of how well the strategies can catch faults.

Requirements specification is an important problem in software engineering. Key challenges in Requirements Engineering (RE) include enabling different stakeholders to understand and validate the requirements, and enabling collaboration among different types of stakeholders with different skills and expertise and potentially conflicting needs and expectations. We contend that collaboration among both technical and non-technical stakeholders is improved by a requirements specification technique that provides both precision and usability - and a better balance of the two. We implement our specification technique in iMuse - Interactive Model-based Use-case and Storytelling Environment. In this demo, we show how iMuse can be used by stakeholders to express and view narrative functional requirements.

This paper presents a specification-based approach that addresses several known challenges including false positives and domain knowledge errors. Our approach begins with a goal graph and plans. Source code is annotated with goals and events and precompiled to emit those at run time. Plans are automatically translated into a rule-based recognizer. An oracle is produced from the pre- and postconditions associated with the plan's goals. When the program is executed, goals and events are emitted and automatically tested against plans and oracles. The concept is demonstrated on a small example and a larger publicly available case study