Jin L.C. Guo

McGill University | McGill · School of Computer Science

When learning a new technology, programmers often have to sift through multiple online resources to find information that addresses their questions. Prior work has reported that information seekers use a number of different strategies, including following scents, or indicators, to locate appropriate resources. We present a qualitative and quantitat...

Model-Based Software Engineering provides various modelling formalisms for capturing the structural, behavioral, configuration, and intentional aspects of software systems. One of the most widely used kinds of models—domain models—are used during requirements analysis or the early stages of design to capture the domain concepts and relationships in...

Understanding the correct API usage sequences is one of the most important tasks for programmers when they work with unfamiliar libraries. However, programmers often encounter obstacles to finding the appropriate information due to either poor quality of API documentation or ineffective query-based searching strategy. To help solve this issue, rese...

Machine learning models have been widely developed, released, and adopted in numerous applications. Meanwhile, the documentation practice for machine learning models often falls short of established practices for traditional software components, which impedes model accountability, inadvertently abets inappropriate or misuse of models, and may trigg...

User forums of Open Source Software (OSS) enable end-users to collaboratively discuss problems concerning the OSS applications. Despite decades of research on OSS, we know very little about how end-users engage with OSS communities on these forums, in particular, the challenges that hinder their continuous and meaningful participation in the OSS co...

Inspiration from design examples plays a crucial role in the creative process of user interface design. However, current tools and techniques that support inspiration usually only focus on example browsing with limited user control or similarity-based example retrieval, leading to undesirable design outcomes such as focus drift and design fixation....

Recently, practitioners and researchers met to discuss the role of requirements, and AI and SE. We offer here notes on that fascinating discussion. Also, have you considered writing for this column? This “SE for AI” column publishes commentaries on the growing field of SE for AI. Submissions are welcomed and encouraged (1,000–2,400 words, each figu...

Given the vast number of repositories hosted on GitHub, project discovery and retrieval have become increasingly important for GitHub users. Repository descriptions serve as one of the first points of contact for users who are accessing a repository. However, repository owners often fail to provide a high-quality description; instead, they use vagu...

Traceability between published scientific breakthroughs and their implementation is essential, especially in the case of open-source scientific software which implements bleeding-edge science in its code. However, aligning the link between GitHub repositories and academic papers can prove difficult, and the current practice of establishing and main...

Modern open source software development heavily relies on the issue tracking systems to manage their feature requests, bug reports, tasks, and other similar artifacts. Together, those "issues" form a complex network with links to each other. The heterogeneous character of issues inherently results in varied link types and therefore poses a great ch...

Although computer science papers are often accompanied by software artifacts, connecting research papers to their software artifacts and vice versa is not always trivial. First of all, there is a lack of well-accepted standards for how such links should be provided. Furthermore, the provided links, if any, often become outdated: they are affected b...

As open source software (OSS) becomes increasingly mature and popular, there are significant challenges with properly accounting for usability concerns for the diverse end users. Participatory design, where multiple stakeholders collaborate on iterating the design, can be an efficient way to address the usability concerns for OSS projects. However,...

Documentation for programming languages and their APIs takes many forms, such as reference documentation, blog posts or other textual and visual media. Prior research has suggested that developers switch between reference and tutorial-like documentation while learning a new API. Documentation creation and maintenance is also an effort-intensive pro...

Usability is an increasing concern in open source software (OSS). Given the recent changes in the OSS landscape, it is imperative to examine the OSS contributors’ current valued factors, practices, and challenges concerning usability. We accumulated this knowledge through a survey with a wide range of contributors to OSS applications. Through analy...

Usability is an increasing concern in open source software (OSS). Given the recent changes in the OSS landscape, it is imperative to examine the OSS contributors' current valued factors, practices, and challenges concerning usability. We accumulated this knowledge through a survey with a wide range of contributors to OSS applications. Through analy...

We present a multi-relational temporal Knowledge Graph based on the daily interactions between artifacts in GitHub, one of the largest social coding platforms. Such representation enables posing many user-activity and project management questions as link prediction and time queries over the knowledge graph. In particular, we introduce two new datas...

In open-source software (OSS), the design of usability is often influenced by the discussions among community members on platforms such as issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, digesting the rich information embedded in issue discussions can be a major challenge due to the vast number and diversity of the comments. We propose and evaluate ArguLen...

In open-source software (OSS), the design of usability is often influenced by the discussions among community members on platforms such as issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, digesting the rich information embedded in issue discussions can be a major challenge due to the vast number and diversity of the comments. We propose and evaluate ArguLen...

Traceability is the ability to relate di erent artifacts during the development and operation of a system to each other. It enables program comprehension, change impact analysis, and facilitates the cooperation of engineers from di erent disciplines. The 10th International Workshop on Software and Systems Traceability (former International Workshop...

Contributors to open source software (OSS) communities assume diverse roles to take different responsibilities. One major limitation of the current OSS tools and platforms is that they provide a uniform user interface regardless of the activities performed by the various types of contributors. This paper serves as a non-trivial first step towards r...

The increasing availability and diversity of virtual reality (VR) applications highlighted the importance of their usability. Function-oriented VR applications posed new challenges that are not well studied in the literature. Moreover, user feedback becomes readily available thanks to modern software engineering tools, such as app stores and open s...

Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS) projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving rele...

As new requirements are introduced and implemented in a software system, developers must identify the set of source code classes which need to be changed. Therefore, past effort has focused on predicting the set of classes impacted by a requirement. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new type of information based on the intuition that the s...

Software-intensive projects are specified and modeled using domain terminology. Knowledge of the domain terminology is necessary for performing many Software Engineering tasks such as impact analysis, compliance verification, and safety certification. However, discovering domain terminology and reasoning about their interrelationships for highly te...

As new requirements are introduced and implemented in a software system, developers must identify the set of source code classes which need to be changed. Therefore, past effort has focused on predicting the set of classes impacted by a requirement. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new type of information based on the intuition that the s...

Software and systems traceability is widely accepted as an essential element for supporting many software development tasks. Today's version control systems provide inbuilt features that allow developers to tag each commit with one or more issue ID, thereby providing the building blocks from which project-wide traceability can be established betwee...

Usability and user experience (UX) issues are often not well emphasized and addressed in open source software (OSS) development. There is an imperative need for supporting OSS communities to collaboratively identify, understand, and fix UX design issues in a distributed environment. In this paper, we provide an initial step towards this effort and...

In most safety-critical domains the need for traceability is prescribed by certifying bodies. Trace links are generally created among requirements, design, source code, test cases and other artifacts, however, creating such links manually is time consuming and error prone. Automated solutions use information retrieval and machine learning technique...

Software and systems traceability is widely accepted as an essential element for supporting many software development tasks. Today's version control systems provide inbuilt features that allow developers to tag each commit with one or more issue ID, thereby providing the building blocks from which project-wide traceability can be established betwee...

Many therapists who work with patients who have had a brain injury (BI) include games to ameliorate boredom associated with repetitive rehabilitation exercises. However, designing effective, appropriate, and engaging games for BI therapy is challenging. Following a user-centered approach we created GaPBIT (Game Design Patterns for BI Therapy), a pr...

Serious games for health utilize game media to help players attain health-related goals. Game designers play a crucial role in this growing game genre; they focus on particularly challenging design problems that are not well represented in the literature. In this study, we interviewed 11 professional game designers focused on games for health to ex...

Software artifacts, such as requirements, design, source code, documentation, and safety-related artifacts are typically expressed using domain-specific terminology. Automated tools which attempt to analyze software artifacts in order to perform tasks such as trace retrieval and maintenance, domain analysis, program comprehension, or to service nat...

Software project artifacts such as source code, requirements, and change logs represent a gold-mine of actionable information. As a result, software analytic solutions have been developed to mine repositories and answer questions such as "who is the expert?," "which classes are fault prone?," or even "who are the domain experts for these fault-pron...

State-of-the-art software trace retrieval techniques are unable to perform the complex reasoning that a human analyst follows in order to create accurate trace links between artifacts such as regulatory codes and requirements. As a result, current algorithms often generate imprecise links. To address this problem, we present the Domain-Contextualiz...

Automated trace creation techniques are based on a variety of algorithms ranging from basic term matching approaches to more sophisticated expert systems. In this position paper we propose a classification scheme for categorizing the intelligence level of automated traceability techniques. We show that the vast majority of relevant work in the past...

Attempts to utilize information retrieval techniques to fully automate the creation of traceability links have been hindered by terminology mismatches between source and target artifacts. Therefore, current trace retrieval algorithms tend to produce imprecise and incomplete results. In this paper we address this mismatch by proposing an expert syst...