Daniela Damian

University of Victoria | UVIC

Kezia Devathasan, Nowshin Nawar Arony, Daniela Damian

Nowshin Nawar Arony, Kezia Devathasan, Ze Shi Li, and Daniela Damian

This chapter presents, from our research on inclusive software within the context of a diversity and inclusion based STEM program at the University of Victoria, INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact (hereafter Inspire). In a society with an ever increasing reliance on technology, we often neglect the fact that software development processes and practices...

AI assistance tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have dramatically impacted the nature of software development in recent years. Numerous studies have studied the positive benefits that practitioners have achieved from using these tools in their work. While there is a growing body of knowledge regarding the usability aspects of leveraging AI...

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift away from co-located work arrangements towards working from home, practitioners encountered many collaborative and coordination challenges. While companies are slowly moving back towards in-person arrangements, many employers have permanently adopted fully remote and hybrid work modes. H...

Online user feedback has become an essential mechanism for software organizations to gain insight into user concerns and to recognize areas for improvement. In software platform ecosystems, staying abreast of user feedback is particularly challenging due to the multitude of feedback channels and the complex interplay with third party applications....

Building a shared understanding of non-functional requirements (NFRs) is a known but understudied challenge in requirements engineering, primarily in organizations that adopt continuous software engineering (CSE) practices. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many CSE organizations complied with working remotely due to the imposed health rest...

Context The COVID-19 pandemic posed challenges to people from all professions and walks of life, and software professionals were no exceptions. Objective In this study, we investigated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on software professionals and their work practices with a focus on New Zealand. We specifically examined how software profession...

The increasing importance of videos as a medium for engagement, communication, and content creation makes them critical for organizations to consider for user feedback. However, sifting through vast amounts of video content on social media platforms to extract requirements-relevant feedback is challenging. This study delves into the potential of Ti...

While a lack of diversity is a longstanding problem in computer science and engineering, universities and organizations continue to look for solutions to this issue. Among the first of its kind, we launched INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact, a program at the University of Victoria, Canada, aimed to motivate and empower students from underrepresented...

For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm's ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product pla...

Context: In the Requirements Engineering (RE) process of an Open Source Software (OSS) community, an involved firm is a stakeholder among many. Conflicting agendas may create miss-alignment with the firm's internal requirements strategy. In communities with meritocratic governance or with aspects thereof, a firm has the opportunity to affect the RE...

Privacy requirements are increasingly growing in importance as new privacy regulations are enacted. To adequately manage privacy requirements, organizations not only need to comply with privacy regulations, but also consider user privacy concerns. In this exploratory study, we used Reddit as a source to understand users' privacy concerns regarding...

Building a shared understanding of non-functional requirements (NFRs) is a known but understudied challenge in requirements engineering, especially in organizations that adopt continuous software engineering (CSE) practices. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many CSE organizations complied with working remotely due to the imposed health res...

Context Software developers work on various tasks and activities that contribute towards creating and maintaining software applications, frameworks, or other software components. These include technical (e.g., writing code and fixing bugs) and non-technical activities (e.g., communicating within or outside teams to understand, clarify, and resolve...

Context Complying with privacy regulations has taken on new importance with the introduction of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other privacy regulations. Privacy measures are becoming a paramount requirement demanding software organizations’ attention as recent privacy breaches such as the Capital One data breach affected mi...

The last decade, deemed the age of the platform [1], saw a major shift in how software organizations operate and leverage platforms as a flavor of open innovation to extend their markets or “grow the pie” [2]. These platforms are used to underpin and form Software Ecosystems (SECOs) through which the platform provider, also known as the keystone or...

Non-functional requirements (NFR), which include performance, availability, and maintainability, are vitally important to overall software quality. However, research has shown NFRs are, in practice, poorly defined and difficult to verify. Continuous software engineering practices, which extend agile practices, emphasize fast paced, automated, and r...

Non-functional requirements (NFR), which include performance, availability, and maintainability, are vitally important to overall software quality. However, research has shown NFRs are, in practice, poorly defined and difficult to verify. Continuous software engineering practices, which extend agile practices, emphasize fast paced, automated, and r...

This chapter assesses whether the short-term benefits of using digital technology to suppress the Covid-19 pandemic justify the detrimental long-term consequences for privacy. It addresses this complex question through an inevitably incomplete discussion of privacy data protection laws, technology design, and trust in governments and technology pro...

Context A widely adopted methodology, agile software development provides enhanced flexibility to actively adjust a project scope. In agile teams, particularly in distributed environment, developers interact, manage requirements knowledge, and coordinate primarily in online collaboration tools. Developer conversations become invaluable sources to t...

Software support ticket escalations can be an extremely costly burden for software organizations all over the world. Consequently, there exists an interest in researching how to better enable support analysts to handle such escalations. In order to do so, we need to develop tools to reliably predict if, and when, a support ticket becomes a candidat...

When a developer is writing code they are usually focused and in a state-of-mind which some refer to as flow. Breaking out of this flow can cause the developer to lose their train of thought and have to start their thought process from the beginning. This loss of thought can be caused by interruptions and sometimes slow IDE interactions. Predictive...

Understanding and keeping the customer happy is a central tenet of requirements engineering. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature...

The original version of this article contains an error in the Acknowledgements section. The correct text should read as follows.

Building shared understanding of requirements is key to ensuring downstream software activities are efficient and effective. However, in continuous software engineering (CSE) some lack of shared understanding is an expected, and essential, part of a rapid feedback learning cycle. At the same time, there is a key trade-off with avoidable costs, such...

Learning music is a challenging process that requires years of practice to master, either with lessons from a professional teacher or through self-teaching. While practicing, students are expected to self-evaluate their performance which may be difficult without timely feedback from a professional. Research into computer-assisted music instrument t...

For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm’s ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product pla...

The enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 forced any organization that collects and/or processes EU-based personal data to comply with stringent privacy regulations. Software organizations have struggled to achieve GDPR compliance both before and after the GDPR deadline. While some studies have relied on surveys or inte...

We present research for automatic assessment of pianist hand posture that is intended to help beginning piano students improve their piano-playing technique during practice sessions. To automatically assess a student's hand posture, we propose a system that is able to recognize three categories of postures from a single depth map containing a piani...

Given the connection between the state of a customer's happiness, or lack thereof, and whether a support ticket is escalated, utilizing emotional awareness with respect to support ticket escalations could enhance a software organization's support performance to help ensure customers are satisfied. We describe an approach that 1.) analyzes and monit...

Knowing whether a software feature will be completed in its planned iteration can help with release planning decisions. However, existing research has focused on predictions of only low-level software tasks, like bug fixes. In this paper, we describe a mixed-method empirical study on three large IBM projects. We investigated the types of iteration...

Virtual verification promises measurable gains in productivity of automotive systems development, especially if supported by shared modeling of ECUs (Electronic Control Unit) and their components across the automotive supply chain, and throughout the software development process, long before ECUs and components become available as silicon. Yet, boo...

Context: Software projects often depend on other projects or are developed in tandem with other projects. Within such software ecosystems, knowledge of cross-project technical dependencies is important for (1) practitioners understanding of the impact of their code change and coordination needs within the ecosystem and (2) researchers in exploring...

In today's university climate many first and second year classes have over a hundred students. Large classrooms make some students apprehensive about asking questions. An anonymous method of submitting questions to an instructor would allow students to ask their questions without feeling apprehensive. In this paper we propose a Live Anonymous Quest...

Understanding and keeping the customer happy is a central tenet of requirements engineering. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature...

Managing support tickets in large, multi-product organizations is difficult. Failure to meet the expectations of customers can lead to the escalation of support tickets, which is costly for IBM in terms of customer relationships and resources spent addressing the escalation. Keeping the customer happy is an important task in requirements engineerin...

Contemporary Software Engineering has inevitably become much more social. Due to the size, complexity, and diversity of today's software systems, there is a need to interact across organizational, geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries. Large-scale software development now implies active user involvement and requires close cooperation...

Understanding and keeping the customer happy is a central tenet of requirements engineering. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature...

When a developer is writing code they are usually focused and in a state-of-mind which some refer to as flow. Breaking out of this flow can cause the developer to lose their train of thought and have to start their thought process from the beginning. This loss of thought can be caused by interruptions and sometimes slow IDE interactions. Predictive...

We use Grounded Theory to study the evolution of requirements practices of 16 software startups as they grow and introduce new products and services. These startups operate in a dynamic environment, with significant time and market pressure, and rarely have time for systematic requirements analysis. Our theory describes the evolution of practice al...

Runtime uncertainty such as unpredictable resource unavailability, changing environmental conditions and user needs, as well as system intrusions or faults represents one of the main current challenges of self-adaptive systems. Moreover, today's systems are increasingly more complex, distributed, decentralized, etc. and therefore have to reason abo...

Software engineering practice has shifted from the development of products in closed environments toward more open and collaborative efforts. Software development has become significantly interdependent with other systems (e.g. services, apps) and typically takes place within large ecosystems of networked communities of stakeholder organizations. S...

Runtime uncertainty such as unpredictable resource unavailability, changing environmental conditions and user needs, as well as system intrusions or faults represents one of the main current challenges of self-adaptive systems. Moreover, today's systems are increasingly more complex, distributed, decentralized, etc. and therefore have to reason abo...

In a large organization, informal communication and simple backlogs are not sufficient for the management of requirements and development work. Many large organizations are struggling to successfully adopt agile methods, but there is still little scientific knowledge on requirements management in large-scale agile development organizations. We pres...

Haptic interaction with deformable virtual environments demands high control rates in order to provide realistic interaction forces to the user. However, the update rates of physically-based simulations can be slow and variable for complex deformations. This paper bridges the rate gap between the haptic controller and an arbitrary virtual environme...

Understanding and keeping the customer happy is a central tenet of requirements engineering. Strategies to gather, analyze, and negotiate requirements are complemented by efforts to manage customer input after products have been deployed. For the latter, support tickets are key in allowing customers to submit their issues, bug reports, and feature...

Managing support tickets in large, multi-product organizations is difficult. Failure to meet the expectations of customers can lead to the escalation of support tickets, which is costly for IBM in terms of customer relationships and resources spent addressing the escalation. Keeping the customer happy is an important task in requirements engineerin...

Pioneering educators discuss how they inject realism into global-software-engineering education.

Predicting time and effort of software task completion has been an active area of research for a long time. Previous studies have proposed predictive models based on either text data or metadata of software tasks to estimate either completion time or completion effort of software tasks, but there is a lack of focus in the literature on integrating...

Incorrect hand posture is known to cause fatigue and hand injuries in pianists of all levels. Our research is intended to reduce these problems through new methods of providing direct feedback to piano students during their daily practice. This paper presents an approach to detect hand pos- ture in RGB-D recordings of pianists’ hands while practici...

Software development has always inherently required multitasking: developers switch between coding, reviewing, testing, designing, and meeting with colleagues. The advent of software ecosystems like GitHub has enabled something new: the ability to easily switch between projects. Developers also have social incentives to contribute to many projects;...

Agile software development methods prefer limited use of artefacts. On the basis of existing artefact models and results from three case studies we present a Scrum artefact model. In this model we notice teams using Scrum artefacts, but they, in addition, decided to produce various non-Scrum artefacts, most notably design documents, test plans and...

When software developers fail to coordinate, build failures, duplication of work, schedule slips and software defects can result. However, developers are often unaware when they need to coordinate, and existing methods and tools that help make developers aware of their coordination needs do not provide timely or efficient recommendations. We descri...

Context: the ability to follow other users and projects on GitHub has introduced a new layer of open source software development participants who observe but do not contribute to projects. It has not been fully explored how following others influences the actions of GitHub users. Objective: this paper studies the motivation behind following (or no...

Context: Runtime uncertainty such as unpredictable operational environment and failure of sensors that gather environmental data is a well-known challenge for adaptive systems. Objective: To execute requirements that depend on context correctly, the system needs up-to-date knowledge about the context relevant to such requirements. Techniques to cop...

With over 10 million git repositories, GitHub is becoming one of the most important sources of software artifacts on the Internet. Researchers mine the information stored in GitHub’s event logs to understand how its users employ the site to collaborate on software, but so far there have been no studies describing the quality and properties of the a...

Agile software development (ASD) methods have gained popularity in the industry and been the subject of an increasing amount of academic research. Although requirements engineering (RE) in ASD has been studied, the overall understanding of RE in ASD as a phenomenon is still weak. We conducted a mapping study of RE in ASD to review the scientific li...

Self-adaptive systems are capable of dealing with uncertainty at runtime handling complex issues as resource variability, changing user needs, and system intrusions or faults. If the requirements depend on context, runtime uncertainty will affect the execution of these contextual requirements. This work presents SACRE, a proof-of-concept implementa...

Previous studies on coordination in OSS projects have studied explicit communication. Research has theorized on the existence of coordination without direct communication or implicit coordination in OSS projects, suggesting that it contributes to their success. However, due to the intangible nature of implicit coordination, no studies have confirme...