Alessandra Bagnato

• Ph. D. Computer Science
• Research Responsible at Softeam Software at SOFTEAM

Today, there are many technology domains involved to the creation of large-scale safety-critical systems, which are used in sectors including transport, health, robotics, manufacturing and, in the longer term, will be in the home, where miniaturization will play a role. These applications have the encompassing term of cyber-physical systems (CPS),...

The Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) research field focuses on supporting the convergence of technologies across a multitude of other fields[1] into products like trains, life-support systems and production plants. It is therefore a spectrum supporting integrations across knowledge domains. This is particularly impacting closer to the product-side, whi...

The MORPHEMIC project covers several features from modelling cross-cloud applications, continuous and autonomous optimization and deployment and providing access to several cloud capabilities for data intensive application needing on one hand more and more resources, and, on the other hand, to support different models, such as Edge and Fog, besides...

Thanks to great advances such as in connectivity (including IoT, Big Data), pattern recognition and decision making (AI) and integration technologies (CPS), with computing as a backbone, there is a convergence of technology domains and the real world towards the Next Computing Paradigm (NCP). The integration concerns typical in the realm of CPS, in...

Context: Agile software development (ASD) aims to deliver high-quality software. However, software quality often receives less attention in ASD due to focus on functionality. Objective: Elicit requirements for, design, validate, implement, and evaluate an evidence-based quality-aware ASD process that organizations can use for better integration of...

In their Cloud strategy companies are choosing more and more multi-cloud computing giving them the opportunity to distribute its assets, redundancies, software, applications, and anything it deems worthy not only on one Cloud-hosting environment, but rather across several. The model of using multiple Cloud services to host the business's functions...

The paper presents the AIDOaRT project, a 3 years long H2020-ECSEL European project involving 32 organizations, grouped in clusters from 7 different countries, focusing on AI-augmented automation supporting modeling, coding, testing, monitoring, and continuous development in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). To this end, the project proposes to combine...

The development of future large-scale safety-critical systems, also known as cyber-physical systems (CPS), involves many technology and influencer communities. Novel approaches and tools will be required to tackle the multi-dimensional challenges between these communities to benefit CPS, especially their adaptability to new technologies. ere are ma...

The advent of complex Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) creates the need for more efficient engineering processes. Recently, DevOps promoted the idea of considering a closer continuous integration between system development (including its design) and operational deployment. Despite their use being still currently limited, Artificial Intelligence (AI) t...

Requirements identification in textual documents or extraction is a tedious and error prone task that many researchers suggest automating. We manually annotated the PURE dataset and thus created a new one containing both requirements and non-requirements. Using this dataset, we fine-tuned the BERT model and compare the results with several baseline...

Requirements identification in textual documents or extraction is a tedious and error prone task that many researchers suggest automating. We manually annotated the PURE dataset and thus created a new one containing both requirements and non-requirements. Using this dataset, we fine-tuned the BERT model and compare the results with several baseline...

Communication between developers and testers can be a rich source of insights into software development processes and practices, which may not be easily discoverable from other means like retrospectives or project roadmaps. With the objective of deriving and capitalizing on potential development-related insights, we analyzed developer-tester commun...

With the emergence of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the increasing complexity in development and operation demands for an efficient engineering process. In the recent years DevOps promotes closer continuous integration of system development and its operational deployment perspectives. In this context, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bene...

This chapter outlines the utility of data pipelines modeling in the context of a data driven project and enumerates metrics for evaluating the quality of the data modeling regarding the readability and the comprehensibility of the models. We start with explaining the challenges surrounding the DataBio project that led to the adoption of data pipeli...

Background: Quality requirements (QRs) describe desired system qualities, playing an important role in the success of software projects. In the context of agile software development (ASD), where the main objective is the fast delivery of functionalities, QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed during the development process. Software analy...

There are many communities involved in the creation of cyber-physical systems, which are used in domains including transport, health, manufacturing and, in the longer term, will be in the home, where miniaturization will play a role. In this article we explain that engineering for future CPS needs a centre of gravity that has the purpose of drawing...

Practitioners adopt software metrics programs to support their software development from the perspective of either overall quality, performance, or both. Current literature details and justifies the role of a metrics program in a software organization’s software development, but empirical evidence to demonstrate its actual use and concomitant benef...

Swarms of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) find their application in many domains. Smart traffic is a very prominent application increasingly taking advantage of the self-organizing capabilities of swarms. In this paper we se and extend existing models from libraries designed for CPS swarm behavior that we proposed in other publications.

Recent developments in information technology such as the Internet of Things and the cloud computing paradigm enable public and private organisations to collect large amounts of data to employ various data analytic techniques for extracting important information that helps improve their businesses. Unfortunately, these benefits come with a high cos...

Personal data is currently being used in countless applications in a vast number of areas. Despite national and international legislation, the fact is that users have little or no control over who uses their data and for what purposes, and data protection is still, in many cases, a theoretical possibility only. In this paper, we present an approach...

In this paper we discuss our method on applying the ArchiMate modelling language for specification in the context of Big Data applications. The DataBio project [1] develops the pilot applications for bioeconomy industry by applying Big Data technologies. The project regroups 26 pilots from 17 different countries to be implemented and deployed with...

[email protected] is a large European project dedicated to the provisioning of a model-based methodology and supporting tooling for system engineering at a wide scale. It notably targets the continuous development and runtime validation of such complex systems by developing a framework addressing a large set of engineering processes and application...

The European Project Space at PROFES 2019 provides an opportunity for researchers involved in ongoing and recently completed research projects (national, European, and international) related to the topics of the conference to present their projects and disseminate the objectives, deliverables, or outcome.

Progress in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Computational Linguistics domains offered new way to perform n-depth analysis and evidence-based quality assessments of open source software components. In this paper we will see how this can be integrated into industrial development to improve the quality of developed software.

The Data-Driven Bio-economy project (DataBio) is a large scale project that aims to develop a platform that offers access to big data technologies in the domains of agriculture, fishery and forestry. This project applies the standard Enterprise Architecture language: “ArchiMate 3.0” for modelling the pilot studies and for modelling the software com...

REVaMP project is part of the ITEA 3 industry-driven Research, Development and Innovation programme in the domain of software innovation. REVaMP project aims to develop automated and comprehensive tools that support massive customizing of “Software-Intensive Systems and Services” (SIS) Product Lines (PL). This approach requires agile round-trip eng...

Background: Despite the growth in the use of software analytics platforms in industry, little empirical evidence is available about the challenges that practitioners face and the value that these platforms provide. Aim: The goal of this research is to explore the benefits of using a software analytics platform for practitioners managing quality. Me...

MegaM@Rt 2 Project is a major European effort towards the model-driven engineering of complex Cyber-Physical systems combined with runtime analysis. Both areas are dealt within the same methodology to enjoy the mutual benefits through sharing and tracking various engineering artifacts. The project involves 27 partners that contribute with diverse r...

The REVaMP2 Project is a major European effort towards Round-Trip Engineering of Software Product Lines for software intensive systems. Indeed, software is predominant in almost every modern industry. The importance of time-to-market has grown tremendously in many business domains. Organizations are in a constant search for approaches for mass prod...

The increasing interactions among Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) lead to systems with emerging and unpredictable behaviors. Such an example is the domain of swarm robotics where the interactions among swarm members remain a complex topic especially in environments that are dynamically changing. However, CPSs �nd applications in a number of large-sca...

The CROSSMINER project is an open source project, which is motivat-ed by the increasing dependence on existing open-source software (OSS) to devel-op new complex systems. The project is a follow-up of the previous OSSMETER project. The complexity and diversity ofnew CROSSMINER components and ex-isting OSSMETER ones raised challenges related to the...

In the last decade, modern data analytics technologies have enabled the creation of software analytics tools offering real-time visualization of various aspects related to software development and usage. These tools seem to be particularly attractive for companies doing agile software development. However, the information provided by the available...

In this paper, we present the MegaM@Rt2 ECSEL project and discuss in details our approach for fostering collaboration in this project. We choose to use an internal hackathon approach that focuses on technical collaboration between case study owners and tool/method providers. The novelty of the approach is that we organize the technical workshop at...

MegaM@Rt2 is a large European project dedicated to the provisioning of a model-based methodology and supporting tooling for system engineering at a wide scale. It notably targets the continuous development and runtime validation of such complex systems by developing the MegaM@Rt2 framework to address a large set of engineering processes and applica...

MegaM@Rt2 project is a collaborative initiative of the ECSEL Joint Undertaking under Horizon 2020 EU programme. The project regroups 26 partners from 6 different European countries who jointly address challenges of engineering modern cyber-physical systems by using model-based engineering methods. Since it is a model-based project, we adopted a sim...

Sensors gained a significant role in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in various industry sectors. The information retrieved from the sensors are generally stored in the database for post-processing and analysis. This sensor database could grow rapidly when the data is frequently collected by several sensors altogether. It is thus often re...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) find applications in a number of large-scale, safety-critical domains e.g. transportation, smart cities, etc. As a matter of fact, the increasing interactions amongst different CPS are starting to generate unpredictable behaviors and emerging properties, often leading to unforeseen and/or undesired results. Rather than...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) nd applications in a number of large-scale, safety-critical domains e.g. transportation, smart cities, etc. As a matter of fact, the increasing interactions amongst diierent CPS are starting to generate unpredictable behaviors and emerging properties, often leading to unforeseen and/or undesired results. Rather than bei...

The Software Intensive Systems (SIS) has become dominant in industry. The Product Lines (PL) approach offers significant cost reductions in customisation and rapid development of products targeting various market segments. However, Product Lines Engineering often times requires a complex modelling and co-evolution of multiple assets. That hinders t...

Current approaches to building Cyber Physical systems including Energy Management Systems (EMS) design often rely on large monolithic models to represent the EMS. These models are typically abstract and simple to aid with performance. However, they can lack fidelity and detail, particularly with regards to physical aspects. This makes it challengin...

Softeam has over 20 years of experience providing UML-based modelling solutions, such as its Modelio modelling tool, and its Constellation enterprise model management and collaboration environment. Due to the increasing number and size of the models used by Softeam's clients, Softeam joined the MONDO FP7 EU research project, which worked on solutio...

This paper highlights the benefits within the Green Computing metrics measurement context from the MEASURE ITEA 3 project (Measuring Software Engineering) Project French cluster. It presents the Structured Metrics Meta-model (SMM) used as a standardized language and its implementation within the Softeam's Modelio modelling and ICAM's EMIT, a set of...

Deciding whether an open source software (OSS) meets the required standards for adoption in terms of quality, maturity, activity of development and user support is not a straightforward process. It involves analysing various sources of information, including the project's source code repositories, communication channels, and bug tracking systems. O...

The increasing complexity of software-intensive systems raises a lot of challenges demanding new techniques for ensuring their overall quality. The risk of not meeting the expected level of quality has negative impact on business, customers, environment and people, especially in the context of safety/security-critical systems. The importance of ris...

The chapter presents the EU funded FP7 MADES project that focus on real-time embedded systems development. The project proposes a high abstraction level based model-driven methodology to evolve current practices for real-time embedded systems development in avionics and surveillance industries. In MADES, an effective SysML/MARTE language subset alo...

Big Data is a modern phenomenon that promises to bring unprecedented economical benefits. Hadoop-like MapReduce implementations has gained a well deserved popularity by providing an open-source data management solution running on commodity PC clusters and with a potential of Big Data scale. Nevertheless, there are many critical problems, for which...

Today, system designs and their management are crucial parts of most systems development processes. To stay competitive engineers from several expertise domains use Model-Based engineering (MBE) to design the systems they intend to implement in order to specify, test, simulate, validate and iterate their design as soon as possible. System designs a...

Numerous combinatorial testing tools are available for generating test cases. However, many of them are never used in practice. One of the reasons is the lack of empirical studies that involve human subjects applying testing techniques. This paper aims to investigate the applicability of a combinatorial testing tool in the company SOFTEAM. A case s...

[Context] Automated test case design and execution at the GUI level of applications is not a fact in industrial practice. Tests are still mainly designed and executed manually. In previous work we have described TESTAR, a tool which allows to set-up fully automatic testing at the GUI level of applications to find severe faults such as crashes or no...

Testing a web application is typically very complicated. Imposing simple coverage criteria such as function or line coverage is often not sufficient to uncover bugs due to incorrect components integration. Combinatorial testing can enforce a stronger criterion, while still giving us the ability to prioritize the test cases to keep the overall effor...

As real-time and integrated systems become increasingly sophisticated, issues related to development life cycles, non-recurring engineering costs, and poor synergy between development teams will arise. The Handbook of Research on Embedded Systems Design provides insights from the computer science community on integrated systems research projects t...

Since our society is becoming increasingly dependent on applications emerging on the Future Internet, quality of these applications becomes a matter that cannot be neglected. However, the complexity of the technologies involved in Future Internet applications makes testing extremely challenging. The EU FP7 FITTEST project has addressed some of thes...

This chapter presents the EU-funded MADES FP7 project that aims to develop an effective model-driven methodology to improve the current practices in the development of real-time embedded systems for avionics and surveillance industries. MADES developed an effective SysML/MARTE language subset, and a set of new tools and technologies that support hi...

In most industrial embedded systems development projects, the software and the hardware development parts are separated, and the constraint requirements/capabilities are informally exchanged in the system development phase of the process. To prevent failures due to the violation of timing constraints, hardware components of the platform are typical...

[Context] Numerous combinatorial testing techniques are available for generating test cases. However, many of them are never used in practice. [Objective] Considering that learn ability plays a vital role in initial adoption or rejection of a technology, in this paper we aim to investigate the learnability of a combinatorial testing tool in an indu...

The EU funded FITTEST FP7 project aims to address the Future Internet (FI) testing challenges. FITTEST will be integrated in three pilot applications provided by three industrial partners, IBM, Sulake and Soft am. This paper presents the Modelio SaaS product and case study context selected by Soft am as FITTEST Project industrial application and th...

Security inspections are increasingly important for bringing security-relevant aspects into software systems, particularly during the early stages of development. Nowadays, such inspections often do not focus specifically on security. With regard to security, the well-known and approved benefits of inspections are not exploited to their full potent...

The paper presents the EU funded MADES FP7 project, that aims to develop an effective model driven methodology to evolve current practices for the development of real time embedded systems for avionics and surveillance industries. In MADES, we propose an effective SysML/MARTE language subset and have developed new tools and technologies that suppor...

Software maintenance and support services are key factors to the customer perception of software product quality. The overall goal of FastFix is to provide developers with a real-time maintenance environment that increases efficiency and reduces costs, improving accuracy in identification of failure causes and facilitating their resolution. To achi...

Attack–defense trees can be used as part of threat and risk analysis for system development and maintenance. They are an extension of attack trees with defense measures. Moreover, tree nodes can be decorated with attributes, such as probability, impact, and penalty, to increase the expressiveness of the model. Attribute values are typically assigne...

Security inspections are increasingly important for bringing security-relevant aspects into software systems, particularly during the early stages of development. Nowadays, such inspections often do not focus specifically on security. With regard to security, the well-known and approved benefits of inspec-tions are not exploited to their full poten...

Attack–defense trees can be used as part of threat and risk analysis for system development and maintenance. They are an extension of attack trees with defense measures. Moreover, tree nodes can be decorated with attributes, such as probability, impact and penalty, to increase the expressiveness of the model. Attribute values are typically assigned...

This work considers the case of system maintenance where systems are already deployed and for which some faults or security issues were not detected during the testing phase. We propose an approach based on control theory that allows for automatic generation of maintenance fixes. This approach disables faulty or vulnerable system functionalities an...

In recent years, software testing and maintenance services are key factors of customers' perception of software quality. Nowadays, customers are more demanding about these services, while contribution of maintenance and testing services to products total cost of ownership should be reduced. Reducing these costs is even more crucial for SME's. To do...

In recent years Web-based systems have become extremely popular and, nowadays, they are used in critical environments such as financial, medical, and military systems. As the use of Web applications for security-critical services has increased, the number and sophistication of attacks against these applications have grown as well. For this reason i...

Security inspections, especially in the early development stage, are becoming increasingly important for bringing security-relevant aspects into software systems. Nowadays, such inspections often do not focus in detail on security. The well-known and approved benefits of inspections do not exploit their full potential regarding security. Thus, we h...

This article introduces the MADES Project [1]. MADES is develop-ing new model-driven technologies to improve current practices in the devel-opment of embedded systems for the avionics and surveillance embedded sys-tems industries, in particular taking advantage of MARTE [3], the OMG UML profile dedicated to Modelling and Analysis of Real time and E...

Most of the reoccurring types of security problems can be solved by known mitigations in most software products, preferably as early as possible during development. Representing mitigation knowledge in form of reusable security models will help developers in improving software security and learning from past mistakes. This paper explains six model-...

Legacy systems are valuable assets and retaining their value is the common objective of modernization eorts. The problem has been known for years, but as time passes, and the amount of legacy code increases, it now demands for holistic, automated, and viable solutions. Similarly to the OMG ADM (Architecture Driven Modernization) initia- tive, MOMOC...