Damian Andrew Tamburri

University of Sannio | UniSannio · Department of Engineering (DING)

Social debt is analogous to technical debt in many ways: it represents the state of software development organisations as the result of “accumulated” decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions are about people and their interactions. Our objective was to study the causality around social debt in practice. In so doing, we conducted exploratory...

“Social debt” in software engineering informally refers to unforeseen project cost connected to a “suboptimal” development community. The causes of suboptimal development communities can be many, ranging from global distance to organisational barriers to wrong or uninformed socio-technical decisions (i.e., decisions that influence both social and t...

Software development is increasingly carried out by developer communities in a global setting. One way to prepare for development success is to uncover and harmonize these communities to exploit their collective, collaborative potential. A proposed decision tree can help practitioners do this.

Software engineering evolved from a rigid process to a dynamic interplay of people (e.g. stakeholders or developers). Organizational and social literature call this interplay an organizational social structure (OSS). Software practitioners still lack a systematic way to select, analyze and support OSSs best fitting their problems (e.g. software dev...

Many architectural languages have been proposed in the last fifteen years, each one with the chief aim of becoming the ideal language for specifying software architectures. What is evident nowadays, instead, is that architectural languages are defined by stakeholder concerns. Capturing all such concerns within a single, narrowly focused notation is...

Bitcoin and Ethereum, respectively the first and the second generations of blockchains, exhibit two main problems, mostly connected to the increase of network traffic and load onto their respective networking and service models: scalability and interoperability. To solve these issues, several technologies have been introduced—thus paving the way to...

The anonymity and untraceability benefits of the dark web increased its popularity exponentially. The cost of these technical benefits is that such anonymity has created a suitable womb for illicit activity. Hence—in collaboration with cybersecurity practitioners and law-enforcement agencies—the research community provided approaches for recognizin...

Data mesh is an emerging domain-driven decentralized data architecture that aims to minimize or avoid operational bottlenecks associated with centralized, monolithic data architectures in enterprises. The topic has picked the practitioners’ interest, and considerable gray literature exists. At the same time, we observe a lack of academic attempts a...

This paper introduces an Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) framework specifically designed to efficiently synthesize end-to-end multimodal machine learning pipelines. Traditional reliance on the computationally demanding Neural Architecture Search is minimized through the strategic integration of pre-trained transformer models. This innovative ap...

This paper introduces a scale-invariant methodology employing \textit{Fractal Geometry} to analyze and explain the nonlinear dynamics of complex connectionist systems. By leveraging architectural self-similarity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), we quantify fractal dimensions and \textit{roughness} to deeply understand their dynamics and enhance the...

The Software Crisis has reached AI: according to Gartner’s report in 2021, only around 54% of AI products successfully reach production. Since the early days of software engineering, the rise of complexity has been known to play a key role in projects failing. The goal of this research is to investigate how complexity affects Machine Learning (ML)....

The Software Crisis has reached AI: according to Gartner’s report in 2021, only around 53% of AI products successfully reach production. Since the early days of software engineering, the rise of complexity has been known to play a key role in projects failing. The goal of this research is to investigate how complexity affects Machine Learning (ML)....

Since service-oriented computing was introduced as a major topic in the industry and the research community, 20 years have passed. Today, service orientation has become a commodity in many areas. This has also changed the foci of the research community by a very large degree. In this article, we analyze the current state of the research in the fiel...

Privacy engineering, emphasizing data protection during the design, build, and maintenance of software systems, faces new challenges and opportunities in the emerging decentralized data architectures, namely data mesh. By decentralizing data product ownership across domains, data mesh offers a novel paradigm to rethink how privacy principles are in...

The lack of comprehensive sources of accurate vulnerability data represents a critical obstacle to studying and understanding software vulnerabilities (and their corrections). In this paper, we present an approach that combines heuristics stemming from practical experience and machine-learning (ML)—specifically, natural language processing (NLP)—to...

The service dominant logic is a base concept behind modern economies and software products, with service composition being a well-known practice for companies to gain a competitive edge over others by joining differentiated services together, typically assembled according to a number of features. At the other end of the spectrum, product compositio...

Modern Big Data Analytics services require compliance with non-functional requirements such as privacy, in order to align with the introduced legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Specifically, the Telco industry has been using Big Data Analytics solutions for service continuity, whose basic steps revolve around automat...

As quantum computing matures, organizations must engage early with the technology and eventually adopt it in their business operations to achieve a competitive edge. At the same time, quantum computing experts (e.g., researchers and technology providers) expect extensive input and collaboration with potential adopters to explore new application are...

A discussion on the need for coordinated, governed, data-driven computing education initiatives of the future.

As the most successful realization of serverless, function as a service (FaaS) brings in a novel cloud computing paradigm that can save operating costs, reduce management effort, enable seamless scalability, and augment development productivity. Migration of an existing application to the serverless architecture is, however, an intricate task as a...

Openpilot is a vast open-source semi-automated driving system developed by comma.ai, with 200+ contributors and 750K lines of code according to the OpenHub open-source community-tracking portal. On the one hand, the documentation available gives insights on what Openpilot is capable of doing, how to install it and how people can contribute to it, w...

Serverless computing shifts the responsibilities of provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure resources from developers to cloud service providers, allowing developers to focus solely on their applications. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a serverless computing approach that enables developers to develop their applications as event-driven func...

Service continuity entails establishing an observable and explainable continuum between customer experience and service operations. Such continuum is currently established manually, via service customer management operations (such as service incident management (IM)) often resulting in time‐consuming, human‐detrimental, and error‐prone activities....

Priorities in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) convey the relevance preference of one criterion over another, which is usually reflected by imposing the non-negativity and unit-sum constraints. The processing of such priorities is different than other unconstrained data, but this point is often neglected by researchers, which results in fallac...

Priorities in multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) convey the relevance preference of one criterion over another, which is usually reflected by imposing the non-negativity and unit-sum constraints. The processing of such priorities is different than other unconstrained data, but this point is often neglected by researchers, which results in fallac...

Data mesh is an emerging domain-driven decentralized data architecture that aims to minimize or avoid operational bottlenecks associated with centralized, monolithic data architectures in enterprises. The topic has picked the practitioners' interest, and there is considerable gray literature on it. At the same time, we observe a lack of academic at...

Technical debt occurs in many different forms across software artifacts. One such form is connected to software architectures where debt emerges in the form of structural anti-patterns across architecture elements, namely, architecture smells. As defined in the literature, ``Architecture smells are recurrent architectural decisions that negatively...

Going data intensive requires much effort not only in the design, but also in system/infrastructure configuration and deployment; most of these activities still happen via heavy manual fine-tuning and often costly trial-and-error experimentation.This book chapter introduces the field of data engineering; sets out to list the key desiderata of moder...

Big data has drawn huge attention from researchers and policy and decision makers in governments and enterprises. As the speed of information growth exceeded Moore’s law at the beginning of this new century, excessive data is making great troubles to businesses and organizations. Nevertheless, great potential and highly useful value are hidden in t...

Over the last years, we faced an exponential growth of illegal online market services in the Dark Web, making it easier than ever before of acquiring illicit goods online via a simple service interaction. To study and understand this emerging illegal services economy, we developed a trend analysis and (dark-)web services monitoring tool: SENSEI, wh...

Considering the massive increase in the number of crimes in the last decade, as well as the outlook toward smarter cities and more sustainable urban living, the emerging cyber-physical space (CPS) obtained by the interaction of such physical spaces with the cyber elements around them (e.g., think of Internet-of-Things devices or hyperconnected mobi...

Infrastructure‐as‐code (IaC) helps keep up with the demand for fast, reliable, high‐quality services by provisioning and managing infrastructures through configuration files. Those files ensure efficient and repeatable routines for system provisioning, but they might be affected by code smells that negatively affect quality and code maintenance. Re...

This special issue shows how the realm of infrastructure code has evolved to a status which—analyzed from a scientific perspective—can be considered mature, and rich in practices which can be seen as off-the-shelf approaches to continuous software engineering.

Machine learning is widely used to predict software defect-prone components, facilitating testing and improving application quality. In a recent meta-analysis on binary classification for software defect prediction, the so-called researcher bias —i.e., the group who conducts the study— has been shown to play a critical role; the analysis, however,...

Cloud applications are more and more microservice-oriented, but a concrete charting of the microservices architecture landscape -- namely, the space of technical options available for microservice software architects in their decision-making -- is still very much lacking, thereby limiting the ability of software architects to properly evaluate thei...

Blockchain architectures promise disruptive innovation but factually they pose many architectural restrictions to classical service-based applications and show considerable design, implementation, and operations overhead. Furthermore, the relation between such overheads and user benefits is not clear yet. To shed light on the aforementioned relatio...

Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) practices have shown several benefits for software development and operations, e.g., faster release cycles and early discovery of defects. For Cyber-Physical System (CPS) development, CI/CD can help achieving required goals, such as high dependability, yet it may be challenging to apply. This paper empiri...

p>Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) streamline the lifecycle of machine-learning models in production. In recent years, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners, and consequently, a considerable number of tools and gray literature on architecting MLOps environments has emerged. However, this has created a new problem for organizations:...

p>Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) streamline the lifecycle of machine-learning models in production. In recent years, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners, and consequently, a considerable number of tools and gray literature on architecting MLOps environments has emerged. However, this has created a new problem for organizations:...

In recent years, job advertisements through the web or social media represent an easy way to spread this information. However, social media are often a dangerous showcase of possibly labor exploitation advertisements. This paper aims to determine the potential indicators of labor exploitation for unskilled jobs offered in the Netherlands. Specifica...

Blockchain architectures promise disruptive innovation but factually they pose many architectural restrictions to classical service-based applications and show considerable design, implementation, and operations overhead. Furthermore, the relation between such overheads and user benefits is not clear yet. To shed light on the aforementioned relatio...

Linguistic anti-patterns are recurring poor practices concerning inconsistencies in the naming, documentation, and implementation of an entity. They impede the readability, understandability, and maintainability of source code. This paper attempts to detect linguistic anti-patterns in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scripts used to provision and manag...

The deployment and management of Blockchain applications require non-trivial efforts given the unique characteristics of their infrastructure (i.e., immutability) and the complexity of the software systems being executed. The operation of Blockchain applications is still based on ad-hoc solutions that are error-prone, difficult to maintain and evol...

Internet of things (IoT) technologies are becoming a more and more widespread part of civilian life in common urban spaces, which are rapidly turning into cyber–physical spaces. Simultaneously, the fear of terrorism and crime in such public spaces is ever‐increasing. Due to the resulting increased demand for security, video‐based IoT surveillance s...

The speeding growth of the IT market and the spreading of disruptive technologies are leading towards more and more risky operations in need of constant upkeep, monitoring as well as proactive orchestration. On the one hand, the property allowing a system to be catered by automated monitoring and healing technology is defined as observability . On...

DevOps has become increasingly widespread, with companies employing its methods in different fields. In this context , MLOps automates Machine Learning pipelines by applying DevOps practices. Considering the high number of tools available and the high interest of the practitioners to be supported by tools to automate the steps of Machine Learning p...

This work consolidates and compounds previous investigations in recognizing defects for infrastructure‐as‐code (IaC) scripts using general software development quality metrics with a focus on defect severity but adding to previous work an explorative look at creating datasets, which may boost the predictive power of provided models—we call this not...

Internet of things (IoT) technologies are becoming a more and more widespread part of civilian life in common urban spaces, which are rapidly turning into cyber-physical spaces. Simultaneously, the fear of terrorism and crime in such public spaces is ever-increasing. Due to the resulting increased demand for security, video-based IoT surveillance s...