Fernando Figueira Filho

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte | IIP · Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics

Ecossistemas de software (ECOS) móvel são os ecossistemas nos quais os desenvolvedores interagem para a criação de aplicações móveis para atender aos usuários das plataformas relacionadas. Nesta pesquisa, buscou-se a identificação de como a dimensão de negócio pode impactar na decisão de participar de um ECOS ou em sua carreira. Para isso, conduziu...

Hackathons são eventos de curta duração onde seus participantes trabalham para desenvolver um software em até 48 horas. Apesar da rica literatura existente sobre este tema, ainda existem poucos estudos direcionados ao que acontece após esses eventos. Desta forma, este trabalho tem como objetivo investigar questões relacionadas ao chamado pós-hackat...

Eventos de curta duração, tais como hackathons e game jams, envolvem equipes de projeto que colaboram por um curto período de tempo. As pesquisas anteriores exploraram vários aspectos desses eventos, mas os fatores que contribuem ou atrapalham uma colaboração bem-sucedida entre membros de equipes de projeto são ainda desconhecidos. Neste artigo, sã...

The Software Evolution area brings applications to the Mobile era in which users want to use these applications on their mobile devices. A Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO) is the kind of ecosystems in which developers build applications to attend the needs of mobile technologies users (e.g., Android and iOS). Literature explains that the capabilit...

While tools which help developers make sense of everything that goes on in a software project are necessary to enable developer awareness, these tools currently favour quantitative information over qualitative information. To accuractly represent what goes on in a software project, awareness tools need to focus on summarizing instead of measuring i...

Hackathons are events where their participants face the challenge of working intensively and collaboratively with other people. In these events, the participants have the opportunity to develop functional prototypes and solutions to real problems in a short time period (one to three days). Those kind of events have become increasingly popular and s...

Open Government Data (OGD) is seen as a way to promote transparency, as well as to provide information to the population by opening data related to various government sectors and processes. By using applications developed with this type of data, citizens gain knowledge about a certain public sphere; governments, in turn, are able to promote transpa...

Open Government Data (OGD) is seen as a way to promote transparency, as well as to provide information to the population by opening data related to various government sectors and processes. By using applications developed with this type of data, citizens gain knowledge about a certain public sphere; governments, in turn, are able to promote transpa...

Traditional software engineering courses often prioritize methodologies and concepts in small, controlled environments: naive projects used as a proof of concept instead of full-fledged real software systems. Although this strategy has clear benefits, it does not place enough care in training students to face complex, non-trivial legacy software pr...

Developers are using more and more different channels and tools to collaborate, and integrations between these tools are becoming more prevalent. In turn, more data about developers’ interactions at work will become available. These developments will likely make People Analytics — using data to show and improve how people collaborate — more accessi...

Software ecosystems as a paradigm for large-scale software development encompass a complex mix of technical, business, and social aspects. While significant research has been conducted to understand both the technical and business aspects, the social aspects of software ecosystems are less well understood. To close this gap, this paper presents the...

Software developers use many different communication tools and channels in their work. The diversity of these tools has dramatically increased over the past decade and developers now have access to a wide range of socially enabled communication channels and social media to support their activities. The availability of such social tools is leading t...

Software ecosystems have become a new paradigm for the development of large-scale software, bringing a complex mixture of technical, business and social aspects. Although previous research has focused on understanding both the technical and business aspects, the social side of software ecosystems is less understood. To fill this gap, this paper pre...

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game context to engage and to motivate people to achieve goals. Its use is becoming very popular in software development organizations due to work being based upon human-centric and brain-intensive activity. This paper presents the topics of collaboration and gamification in the context of software en...

Social skills and teamwork practices were identified as the main deficiencies of recent graduates in computer science and software engineering courses. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research aimed at investigating the challenges faced by teachers of those courses in conducting, monitoring and assessing software development proje...

Productivity as a result of individual developers' contributions is an important aspect for software companies to maintain their competitiveness in the market. However, there is no consensus in the literature on how to measure productivity or developer contribution. While some repository mining-based metrics have been proposed, they lack validation...

Many tools that automatically analyze, summarize, or transform software artifacts rely on natural language processing tooling for the interpretation of natural language text produced by software developers, such as documentation, code comments, commit messages, or bug reports. Processing natural language text produced by software developers is chal...

To be able to respond to source code modifications with large impact or commits that necessitate further examination , developers and managers in a software development team need to be aware of anything unusual happening in their software projects. To address this need, we introduce UEDashboard, a tool which automatically detects unusual events in...

Software developers pursue a wide range of activities as part of their work, and making sense of what they did in a given time frame is far from trivial as evidenced by the large number of awareness and coordination tools that have been developed in recent years. To inform tool design for making sense of the information available about a developer'...

This work presents an automatic approach to detect unusual events in software repositories. The approach collects data from source code repositories and analyzes new commits based on historical data in order to detect unusual events that are displayed to developers and managers in an awareness tool.

Brazil is an emerging economy with many IT initiatives from public and private sectors. To evaluate the progress of such initiatives, we study the geographical distribution of software developers in Brazil, in particular which of the Brazilian states succeed the most in attracting and nurturing them. We compare the prestige of developers with socio...

There are several mobile platforms that compete with each other to attract software developers. However, it is not yet well understood which factors developers take into account when deciding on a particular platform. We report on an exploratory study that aims to address this gap. Through semi-structured interviews that used diffusion of innovatio...

Software developers rely on media to communicate, learn, collaborate, and coordinate with others. Recently, social media has dramatically changed the landscape of software engineering, challenging some old assumptions about how developers learn and work with one another. We see the rise of the social programmer who actively participates in online c...

Testing is an important part of software development. However, creating a common understanding of a project's testing culture is a demanding task. Without it, the project's quality may degrade. We conducted a Grounded Theory study to understand how testing culture is communicated and disseminated in projects on GitHub. We investigated how the trans...

Each day, more than 500 million users post over 500 million tweets through the Twitter microblogging service. Research has established that many software developers use Twitter in their work, but how or why they use it has not been ana-lyzed. Understanding how developers use Twitter could lead to improved tool and process support, and learning more...

Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files c...

Many software development projects struggle with creating and communicating a testing culture that is appropriate for the project's needs. This may degrade software quality by leaving defects undiscovered. Previous research suggests that social coding sites such as GitHub provide a collaborative environment with a high degree of social transparency...

The multitude of social media channels that programmers can use to participate in software development has given rise to online developer profiles that aggregate activity across many services. Studying members of such developer profile aggregators, we found an ecosystem that revolves around the social programmer. Developers are assessing each other...

Illegal cyberspace activities are increasing rapidly and many software engineers are using reverse engineering methods to respond to attacks. The security-sensitive nature of these tasks, such as the understanding of malware or the decryption of encrypted content, brings unique challenges to reverse engineering: work has to be done offline, files c...

This paper presents results of an exploratory study which observed Linux novice users performing complex technical tasks using Google's search engine. In this study we observed that information triage is a difficult process for unexperienced users unless well structured information is provided which results in better satisfaction and search effecti...

In the latter years, we noticed a paradigm change in the World Wide Web. New web application functionalities incite a growing change in the user's role from a mere information consumer to an active knowledge producer. Web forums are a good example of knowledge repositories which have been collaboratively constructed. However, finding information in...

It is common practice nowadays to find, assess and explore the Web by groping scattered information presented through many search results. Browsing interfaces and query sug-gestion techniques attempt to guide the user by providing term recommendations and query phrases. In this paper, we introduce the browsing interface of Kolline, a commu-nity sea...

Social interaction mediated by information technology has been studied from several perspectives over the past years. This paper draws attention to the relevance of classification systems and categories as important mediation artifacts in human-computer interaction. In this sense, classification schemes provide meaning to information and mutual und...

Through the past years, several digital rights man-agement (DRM) solutions for controlled dissemination of dig-ital information have been developed using cryptography and other technologies. Within so many different solutions, however, interoperability problems arise, which increase the interest on integrated design and management of these technolo...

Through the past years, several digital rights management (DRM) solutions for controlled dissemination of digital information have been developed using cryptography and other technologies. Within so many different solutions, however, interoperability problems arise, which increase the interest on integrated design and management of these technologi...

Ao longo dos últimos anos, diversas soluções na área do Gerenciamento de Direitos Digitais, visando a disseminação controlada de informação, têm sido desenvolvidas usando criptografia e outras tecnologias. Diante de tantas soluções diferentes, entretanto, problemas de interoperabilidade surgem, o que aumenta o interesse no gerenciamento integrado d...

The modelling of access control rules in terms of high-level policies has been subject of research over the last decade. Policies, in this context, define if an access is permitted or forbidden to be performed. However, they do not prescribe rules for the utilization of network resources. In this manner, a user or application might consume availabl...

The modelling of access control rules in terms of high-level policies has been subject of research over the last decade. Policies, in this context, define if an access is permitted or forbidden to be performed. However, they do not prescribe rules for the utilization of network resources. In this manner, a user or application might consume availabl...