Antonio Ruiz-Cortés

• PhD
• Head of Department at University of Seville

The number and complexity of test case generation tools for REST APIs have significantly increased in recent years. These tools excel in automating input generation but are limited by their test oracles, which can only detect crashes, regressions, and violations of API specifications or design best practices. This article introduces AGORA+, an appr...

This document is a pre-print of a manuscript accepted in WESOACS 2024. It has been published on my home-page according to the policy from Springer Nature. This document will be updated with the DOI of the final version once it has been published. The widespread adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS) has led providers to offer diverse pricing to...

As quantum computers advance, the complexity of the software they can execute increases as well. To ensure this software is efficient, maintainable, reusable, and cost-effective —key qualities of any industry-grade software— mature software engineering practices must be applied throughout its design, development, and operation. However, the signifi...

The SaaS paradigm has popularized the usage of pricings, allowing providers to offer customers a wide range of subscription possibilities. This creates a vast configuration space for users, enabling them to choose the features and support guarantees that best suit their needs. Regardless of the reasons why changes in these pricings are made, the fr...

Context: The Open Science (OS) movement promotes the value of making public the research artifacts (datasets, analysis scripts, guidelines, etc.) used during empirical studies. OS is widely known in areas such as Medicine or Biology, where the process of sharing research artifacts is subject to strict protocols. Unfortunately, in Software Engineeri...

The evolution of quantum hardware is highlighting the need for advances in quantum software engineering that help developers create quantum software with good quality attributes. Specifically, reusability has been traditionally considered an important quality attribute. Increasing the reusability of quantum software will help developers create more...

Governify is a service governance framework designed to enhance service operation by providing automated audit capabilities. It enables the creation of customized microservice architectures to fit various domains. This framework has been applied in real scenarios in both Industry and Academy where it has served researchers and practitioners in serv...

Quantum algorithms are a very promising field. However, creating and manipulating these kind of algorithms is a very complex task, specially for software engineers used to work at higher abstraction levels. The work presented here is part of a broader research focused on providing operations of a higher abstraction level to manipulate integers codi...

Nowadays, public web APIs are considered as business assets by many organizations. They provide data and functionality which other developers can integrate within their own services. These APIs are commercialized through pricings, which include a series of plans. Each plan contains features and limitations, coupled with a price. Developers who wish...

Quantum algorithms are a very promising field. However, creating and manipulating these kind of algorithms is a very complex task, specially for software engineers used to work at higher abstraction levels. The work presented here is part of a broader research focused on providing operations of a higher abstraction level to manipulate integers codi...

The so-called API economy has popularised the consumption of APIs and their payment through pricing plans. This trend is very much in line with and particularly beneficial for systems with a microservices architecture that makes use of external APIs. In these cases, more and more often, the design of the system is based on the premise that its func...

The evolution of quantum hardware is highlighting the need for advances in quantum software engineering that help developers create quantum software with good quality attributes. Specifically, reusability has been traditionally considered an important quality attribute in terms of efficiency of cost and effort. Increasing the reusability of quantum...

Grover's algorithm is a well-known contribution to quantum computing. It searches one value within an unordered sequence faster than any classical algorithm. A fundamental part of this algorithm is the so-called oracle, a quantum circuit that marks the quantum state corresponding to the desired value. A generalization of it is the oracle for Amplit...

The need of replicating empirical studies in Computer Science is widely recognized among the research community. It is essential to report the changes of each replication to promote not only the comprehensibility of the evolution of the experimental validity across a family of studies, but also replicability itself. Unfortunately, the lack of propo...

Purpose: The practice of mindfulness aims to improve concentration and attention, which has proven useful in knowledge-intensive and stressful work environments like technological companies. This article aims to find empirical evidence on the positive effect of the practice of mindfulness on a sample of 56 helpdesk employees working for a consultin...

Currently, GraphQL has emerged as a query language for developing web APIs that propose to improve several data access problems of RESTful APIs. The present paper aims to study the effects on software quality of APIs developed with REST and GraphQL architectures consumed from mobile applications. For this, we design a computational experiment that...

Online testing of web APIs—testing APIs in production—is gaining traction in industry. Platforms such as RapidAPI and Sauce Labs provide online testing and monitoring services of web APIs 24/7, typically by re-executing manually designed test cases on the target APIs on a regular basis. In parallel, research on the automated generation of test case...

The massive deployment of Internet-connected devices has led to an increase in the collection of data that are then used by companies to improve their decision-making processes. This growing trend demands more and more cloud and communications infrastructure. The limited resources, the need for sharing them, and the fact that many consumers are int...

GraphQL is a query language and execution engine for web APIs proposed as an alternative to improve data access problems and versioning of REST APIs. In this article, we thoroughly study the GraphQL field, first describing the GraphQL paradigm and its conceptual framework, and then conducting a systematic mapping study (SMS) of 84 primary studies s...

Context: The need of replicating empirical studies in Computer Science (CS) is widely recognized among the research community to consolidate acquired knowledge generalizing results. It is essential to report the changes of each replication to understand the evolution of the experimental validity across a family of studies. Unfortunately, the lack o...

Predictive monitoring is a key activity in some Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) such as information systems for operational management support. Unforeseen circumstances like COVID can introduce changes in human behaviour, processes, or computing resources, which lead the owner of the process or information system to consider whether the qu...

The increasing capabilities of mobile devices have led to the emergence of new paradigms exploiting them. These paradigms foster the onload and distribution of functionalities on mobile devices, allowing the development of distributed mobile applications. This distribution reduces the latency and the data traffic overhead and improves privacy. As i...

Service providers compose services in service chains that require deep integration of core operational information systems across organizations. Additionally, advanced analytics inform data-driven decision-making in corresponding AI-enabled business processes in today’s complex environments. However, individual partner engagements with service cons...

The software development trend uses service-oriented software architecture (SOA), which provides efficiency, agility, and ease of growth. The architectural design most commonly used in SOA application development is REST (Representational State Transfer); however, some data management problems have been identified in its Application Programming Int...

Automated test case generation for web APIs is a thriving research topic, where test cases are frequently derived from the API specification. However, this process is only partially automated since testers are usually obliged to manually set meaningful valid test inputs for each input parameter. In this article, we present ARTE, an approach for the...

In this paper, we deal with questions related to blockchains in complex Internet of Things (IoT)-based ecosystems. Such ecosystems are typically composed of IoT devices, edge devices, cloud computing software services, as well as people, who are decision makers in scenarios such as smart cities. Many decisions related to analytics can be based on d...

Automated test case generation for RESTful APIs is a thriving research topic due to their critical role in software integration. Testing approaches can be divided into black-box and white-box. Black-box approaches exploit the API specification for the generation of test cases, while white-box approaches can also leverage the source code. Both strat...

The modeling and management of business processes often leads to the definition of several variants of the same process. This variability can be reflected in different process perspectives such as control-flow, data, resources or performance. The management of process variants can be a laborious, time-consuming and error-prone task since they requi...

Testing RESTful APIs thoroughly is critical due to their key role in software integration. Existing tools for the automated generation of test cases in this domain have shown great promise, but their applicability is limited as they mostly rely on random inputs, i.e., fuzzing. In this paper, we present RESTest, an open source black-box testing fram...

The software development trend uses service-oriented software architecture (SOA), which provides efficiency, agility, and ease of growth. The architectural design most commonly used in SOA application development is REST (Representational State Transfer); however, some data management problems have been identified in its Application Programming Int...

Board-based software tools for managing collaborative work (e.g. Trello or Microsoft Planner) are highly configurable information systems. Their structure is based on boards that contain cards organized in lists. This structure allows users to organize a wide variety of formal or informal information and work processes in a very flexible way. Howev...

Automated test case generation for RESTful web APIs is a thriving research topic due to their key role in software integration. Most approaches in this domain follow a black-box approach, where test cases are randomly derived from the API specification. These techniques show promising results, but they neglect constraints among input parameters (so...

Cloud computing constant evolution requires dynamic adjustments to service pricing and billing terms, considering provider infrastructures, customer requirements, and discount policies, among others. In this context, Customer Agreements (CA) are used to regulate the service provision including, among other information, the agreed service level in S...

Agile software teams are expected to follow a number of specific Team Practices (TPs) during each iteration, such as estimating the effort ("points") required to complete user stories and coordinating the management of the codebase with the delivery of features. For software engineering instructors trying to teach such TPs to student teams, manuall...

Web services often impose inter-parameter dependencies that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service. Unfortunately, current specification languages for web services like the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) provide no support for the formal description of such dependencies, which makes it...

Automated testing approaches for RESTful web APIs typically follow a black-box strategy, where test cases are derived from the API specification. These techniques show promising results, but they neglect constraints among input parameters (so-called inter-parameter dependencies), as these cannot be formally described in current API specification la...

The explosive growth of the mobile application market in recent years has led to a large concomitant mobile software industry whose components are, in many cases, startups and small-size software providers. The success of these applications and the firms behind them depends on a subtle balance between different dimensions mainly affected by their a...

Business process compliance ensures that the business processes of an organisation are designed and executed according to the rules that enforce the compliance controls that govern the company. We faced the challenge of building a Business Process Compliance Management System (BPCMS) for a process-aware organisation that had to provide support for...

Web services often impose inter-parameter dependencies that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service. Unfortunately, current specification languages for web services like the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) provide no support for the formal description of such dependencies, which makes it...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Context . Mindfulness is a meditation technique whose main goal is keeping the mind calm and educating attention by focusing only on one thing at a time, usually breathing. The reported benefits of its continued practice can be of interest for Software...

Nursing home culture change movement advocates for care that is less hospital-like, and more patient-centered. Despite being a step towards the good direction in providing a proper service for elderly people, considering their well-being is not easy due to a number of factors as: specific treatments with a high price; the number of involved stakeho...

It is well-known that context impacts running instances of a process. Thus, defining and using contextual information may help to improve the predictive monitoring of business processes, which is one of the main challenges in process mining. However, identifying this contextual information is not an easy task because it might change depending on th...

Context: In any discipline, replications of empirical studies are necessary to consolidate the acquired knowledge. In Software Engineering, replications have been reported since the 1990s, although their number is still small. The difficulty in publishing, the lack of guidelines, and the unavailability of replication packages are pointed out by the...

Web services often impose dependency constraints that restrict the way in which two or more input parameters can be combined to form valid calls to the service. Unfortunately, current specification languages for web services like the OpenAPI Specification provide no support for the formal description of such dependencies, which makes it hardly poss...

The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is the de facto standard to describe RESTful APIs from a functional perspective. OAS has been a success due to its simple model and the wide ecosystem of tools supporting the SLA-Driven API development lifecycle. Unfortunately, the current OAS scope ignores crucial information for an API such as its Service Level Agr...

Feature models have been used since the 90's to describe software product lines as a way of reusing common parts in a family of software systems. In 2010, a systematic literature review was published summarizing the advances and settling the basis of the area of Automated Analysis of Feature Models (AAFM). From then on, different studies have appli...

Web APIs following the REST architectural style (so-called RESTful web APIs) have become the de-facto standard for software integration. As RESTful APIs gain momentum, so does the testing of them. However, there is a lack of mechanisms to assess the adequacy of testing approaches in this context, which makes it difficult to automatically measure an...

As software architecture design is evolving to a microservice paradigm, RESTful APIs are being established as the preferred choice to build applications. In such a scenario, there is a shift towards a growing market of APIs where providers offer different service levels with tailored limitations typically based on the cost. In such a context, while...

As software architecture design is evolving to a microservice paradigm, RESTful APIs are being established as the preferred choice to build applications. In such a scenario, there is a shift towards a growing market of APIs where providers offer different service levels with tailored limitations typically based on the cost. In this context, while t...

Agile/XP (Extreme Programming) software teams are expected to follow a number of specific practices in each iteration, such as estimating the effort (”points”) required to complete user stories, properly using branches and pull requests to coordinate merging multiple contributors’ code, having frequent ”standups” to keep all team members in sync, a...

Searching and displaying data based on user queries is a key feature of most software applications such as information systems, web portals, web APIs, and data analytic platforms. The large volume of data managed by these types of systems, henceforth called query-based systems (QBS), makes them extremely hard to test due to the difficulty to assess...

Feature models have been used since the 90's to describe software product lines as a way of reusing common parts in a family of software systems. In 2010, a systematic literature review was published summarizing the advances and settling the basis of the area of Automated Analysis of Feature Models (AAFM). From then on, different studies have appli...

As software architecture design is evolving to microservice paradigms, RESTful APIs become the building blocks of applications. In such a scenario, a growing market of APIs is proliferating and developers face the challenges to take advantage of this reality. For example, third-party APIs typically define different usage limitations depending on th...

Process performance indicators (PPIs) allow the quantitative evaluation of business processes, providing essential information for decision making. It is common practice today that business processes and PPIs are usually modelled separately using graphical notations for the for- mer and natural language for the latter. This approach makes PPI defin...

Knowledge-intensive Processes (KIPs) are processes whose execution is heavily dependent on knowledge workers performing various interconnected knowledge-intensive decision-making tasks. Among other characteristics, KIPs are usually non-repeatable, collaboration-oriented, unpredictable, and, in many cases, driven by implicit knowledge, derived from...

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) regulates the provisioning of a service by defining a set of guarantees. Each guarantee sets a Service Level Objective (SLO) on some service metrics, and optionally a compensation that is applied when the SLO is unfulfilled or overfulfilled. Currently, there are software tools and research proposals that use the info...

Software architecture tendencies are shifting to a microservice paradigm. In this context, RESTful APIs are being established the standard of integration. API designer often identifies two key issues to be competitive in such a growing market. On the one hand, the generation of accurate documentation of the behavior and capabilities of the API to p...

Model transformations play a cornerstone role in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), as they provide the essential mechanisms for manipulating and transforming models. The correctness of software built using MDE techniques greatly relies on the correctness of model transformations. However, it is challenging and error prone to debug them, and the situa...

Sofware distribution models are moving to SaaS paradigms where customers no longer need to buy a perpetual license. In this context, SaaS providers leverage the Service Level Agreement (SLA) concept to delimit the functionality and guarantees to which they commit to their customers. However, although formal specifications for the definition of SLAs...

Context: Performance testing is a challenging task mainly due to the lack of test oracles, i.e. mechanisms to decide whether the performance of a program is acceptable or not because of a bug. Metamorphic testing enables the generation of test cases in the absence of an oracle by exploiting the so-called metamorphic relations between the inputs and...

Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) specify how to access services and data over the network, typically using Web services. Web APIs are rapidly proliferating as a key element to foster reusability, integration, and innovation, enabling new consumption models such as mobile or smart TV apps. Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, eB...

Model transformations are the cornerstone of Model-Driven Engineering, and provide the essential mechanisms for manipulating and transforming models. Checking whether the output of a model transformation is correct is a manual and error-prone task, this is referred to as the oracle problem in the software testing literature. The correctness of the...

Predictive monitoring of business processes is a challenging topic of process mining which is concerned with the prediction of process indicators of running process instances. The main value of predictive monitoring is to provide information in order to take proactive and corrective actions to improve process performance and mitigate risks in real...

Nowadays, process mining is becoming a growing area of interest in business process management (BPM). Process mining consists in the extraction of information from the event logs of a business process. From this information, we can discover process models, monitor and improve our processes. One of the applications of process mining, is the predicti...