Francisca Pérez

Universidad San Jorge | USJ · SVIT Research Group

Video games have characteristics that differentiate their development and maintenance from classic software development and maintenance. These differences have led to the coining of the term Game Software Engineering to name the emerging subfield that intersects Software Engineering and video games. One of these differences is that video game devel...

In industry, software projects might span over decades and many engineers join or leave the company over time. For these reasons, no single engineer has all of the knowledge when maintenance tasks such as Traceability Link Recovery (TLR), Bug Localization (BL), and Feature Location (FL) are performed. Thus, collaboration has the potential to boost...

We present our Evolutionary Boss Improvement (EBI) approach, which receives partially complete bosses as input and generates fully equipped bosses that are complete. Additionally, the evolutionary algorithm and the new genetic operations included in EBI favor genetic improvement, which affects the initial partial content of the incomplete bosses or...

Increasingly, the model driven engineering (MDE) community is paying more attention to the techniques offered by the machine learning (ML) community. This has led to the application of ML techniques to MDE related tasks in hope of increasing the current benefits of MDE. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical experiments that evaluate the benefi...

Traceability links recovery (TLR) has been a topic of interest for many years. However, TLR approaches are based on the latent semantics of the software artifacts, and are not equipped to deal with software artifacts that lack those inherent semantics, such as BPMN models. The aim of this work is to enhance TLR approaches in BPMN models by incorpor...

Feature location is one of the main activities performed during software evolution. In our previous works, we proposed an approach for feature location in models based on machine learning, providing evidence that machine learning techniques can obtain better results than other retrieval techniques for feature location in models. However, to apply m...

Context Traceability Links Recovery has been a topic of interest for many years, resulting in techniques that perform traceability based on the linguistic clues of the software artifacts under study. However, BPMN models tend to present an overall lack of linguistic clues when compared to code-based artifacts or code generation models. Hence, TLR b...

Search-based model-driven engineering is the application of search-based techniques to specific problems that are related to software engineering that is driven using software models. In this work, we make use of measures from the literature to report feature location problems in models (size and volume of the model and density, multiplicity, and d...

Context In the last 20 years, the research community has increased its attention to the use of topic modeling for software maintenance and evolution tasks in code. Topic modeling is a popular and promising information retrieval technique that represents topics by word probabilities. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is one of the most popular topic...

Context Clone and Own (CaO) is a widespread approach to generate new software products from existing software products by adding small changes. The Software Product Line (SPL) approach addresses the development of families of products with similar features, moving away from the production of isolated products. Despite the popularity of both approac...

Context Maintenance activities cannot be completed without locating the set of software artifacts that realize a particular feature of a software system. Manual Feature Location (FL) is widely used in industry, but it becomes challenging (time-consuming and error prone) in large software repositories. To reduce manual efforts, automated FL techniqu...

In the combination of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), genetic operations are one of the key ingredients. Our work proposes a novel adaptation of automatic query reformulations as genetic operations that leverage the latent semantics of software models (the cornerstone artefact of MDE). We analyze the imp...

Internal crowdsourcing in software engineering is a mechanism for recruiting engineers to carry out more efficiently software engineering tasks. However, engineers are busy resources and time is a valuable asset in industry, which hinders internal crowdsourcing in software engineering from becoming a widespread practice. In this work, we propose a...

Often, when requirements are written, parts of the domain knowledge are assumed by the domain experts and not formalized in writing, but nevertheless used to build software artifacts. This issue, known as tacit knowledge, affects the performance of Traceability Links Recovery. Through this work we propose LORE, a novel approach that uses Natural La...

Collaboration with other people is a major theme in the information-seeking process. However, most existing works that address the location of features during the maintenance or evolution of software do not support collaboration, or they are focused on code as the main software artifact. Hence, collaborative feature location in models has not enjoy...

Companies often develop similar product variants that share a high degree of functionality (i.e., features) by copying and modifying code (the clone-and-own approach). In an industrial context with a large amount of variants, software reuse can become complex for engineers. Identifying the clone-and-own relationships between the same feature in dif...

Context Traceability Links Recovery (TLR), Bug Localization (BL), and Feature Location (FL) are amongst the most relevant tasks performed during software maintenance. However, most research in the field targets code, while models have not received enough attention yet. Objective This paper presents our approach (FROM, Fragment Retrieval on Models)...

No maintenance activity can be completed without Feature Location (FL), which is finding the set of software artifacts that realize a particular functionally. Despite the importance of FL, the vast majority of work has been focused on retrieving code, whereas other software artifacts such as the models have been neglected. Furthermore, locating a p...

Automated Model Extraction Rules take as input requirements (in natural language) to generate domain models. Despite the existing work on these rules, there is a lack of evaluations in industrial settings. To address this gap, we conduct an evaluation in an industrial context, reporting the extraction rules that are triggered to create a model from...

In this work, we propose an evolutionary ontological encoding approach to enable Machine Learning techniques to be used to perform Software Engineering tasks in models. The approach is based on a domain ontology to encode a model and on an Evolutionary Algorithm to optimize the encoding. As a result, the encoded model that is returned by the approa...

Feature Location (FL) is one of the most important tasks in software maintenance and evolution. However, current works on FL neglected the collaboration of different domain experts. This collaboration is especially important in long-living industrial domains where a single domain expert may lack the required knowledge to fully locate a feature, so...

The benefits of Software Product Lines (SPL) are very appealing: software development becomes better, faster, and cheaper. Unfortunately, these benefits come at the expense of a migration from a family of products to a SPL. Feature Location could be useful in achieving the transition to SPLs. This work presents our FeLLaCaM approach for Feature Loc...

Software maintenance and evolution activities are responsible for the emergence of a great demand of feature location approaches that search relevant code in a large codebase. However, this search is usually performed manually and relies heavily on developers. In this paper, we propose a feature location approach that, instead of searching directly...

[Background] Bug-fixing could be complex in industrial practice since thousands of products share features in their configuration. Despite the importance and complexity of bug-fixing, there is still a lack of empirical data about the difficulties found in industrial Software Product Lines (SPLs). [Aims] This paper aims to evaluate engineers' perfor...

The ability to manage variability in software has become crucial to overcome the complexity and variety of systems. To this end, a comprehensible representation of variability is important. Nevertheless, in previous works, difficulties have been detected to understand variability in an industrial environment. Specifically, domain experts had diffic...

Models are becoming the new programming code to specify software products. However, most tools that support model descriptions are oriented to a single-user with specific skills, which avoids the involvement of different roles to perform collaborative modeling (such as domain experts, stakeholders or end-users). In this paper, we present an approac...

New technologies are entering medical practice at an astounding pace. However, these technologies often cause to doctors learn and use difficulties. Then, doctors require assistance of a biomedical engineer. This is currently happening in a local hospital that has new technology to analyze biomechanical protocols in patients. Protocols are used to...

Model-Driven Development (MDD) uses models to guide the development of software systems. However, models are usually conceived to be used by software professionals, so it is quite difficult for end-users to understand them because they are not familiar with domain-specific languages or modeling tools as software professionals are. This makes the en...

The models that guide the development of software systems Model-Driven Development (MDD) are usually conceived to be used by software professional developers and they are quite difficult to be understood by end-users. In this work, we propose a method that improves the involvement of end-users within MDD approaches. Furthermore, we present an examp...

Efficient requirements engineering activities are essential in order to develop software systems that properly satisfy end-user needs. End-users lack knowledge about requirements engineering techniques or computation in general, and it is very important that they actively participate in the requirements elicitation process because they are the "own...

Abstract—Developing,smart,home,systems,that properly,fit end-user needs,is not always,an easy task due,to the lack of understanding,that may,exist between,end-users and,system developers. In the context of Software Product Lines, several approaches,have,been,presented,to improve,the development of smart home system functionality. However, little su...