Daniela Damian

University of Victoria | UVIC

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Methodology implementation failure is attributed to developer mediocrity (by management) – not to organizational mediocrity (rigidity or control-driven, process-driven management), or to a lack of adaptation capability in the methodology. In supporting software construction as a creative process, however, we must promote excellence rather than conf...

A growing number of software systems is characterized by continuous evolution as well as by significant interdependence with other systems (e.g. services, apps). Such software ecosystems promise increased innovation power and support for consumer oriented software services at scale, and are characterized by a certain openness of their information f...

Determining the context situations specific to contex-tual requirements is challenging, particularly for environments that are largely unobservable by system designers (e.g., dangerous system contexts of use and mobile applications). In this paper, we describe the application of data mining techniques in a case study of identifying contextual requi...

The need to consider context in order to understand requirements is established in requirements engineering. Recently, this has been discussed more intensively for socio-technical systems, which offer a rich spectrum of different operating contexts. Contextual requirements proved valuable to model requirements together with the context they are val...

With over 10 million git repositories, GitHub is becoming one of the most important source of software artifacts on the Internet. Researchers are starting to mine the infor- mation stored in GitHub’s event logs, trying to understand how its users employ the site to collaborate on software. However, so far there have been no studies describing the q...

Users on GitHub can watch repositories to receive notifications about project activity. This introduces a new type of passive project membership. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of watchers and their contribution to the projects they watch. We find that a subset of project watchers begin contributing to the project and those contributors...

Software engineering research is undertaken to propose innovative solutions, to develop concepts, algorithms, processes, and technologies, to validate effective solutions for important software engineering problems, and ultimately to support the transition of important findings to practice. However prior studies have shown that successful projects...