Juan de Lara

Autonomous University of Madrid | UAM · Department of Computer Engineering

Modelling languages are heavily used in many disciplines, including software engineering. However, current languages are rigid , since they do not get adapted to fit the users’ expertise, the modelling task, or the usage platform. This may turn some languages unsuitable for a range of users (from unexperienced to experts), goals (from informal disc...

Chatbots are an emerging, disruptive technology to access software services via natural language conversation. Companies are adopting task-oriented chatbots to offer customer support, widen availability, lower the entry barrier to their services (e.g., for shopping, booking, or banking), and keep users engaged. This interest in chatbots has promote...

Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots – like ChatGPT – can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots – the focus of this paper – are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Lik...

Recommender systems (RSs) are ubiquitous in all sorts of online applications, in areas like shopping, media broadcasting, travel and tourism, among many others. They are also common to help in software engineering tasks, including software modelling, where we are recently witnessing proposals to enrich modelling languages and environments with RSs....

Modelling languages are intensively used in paradigms like model-driven engineering to automate all tasks of the development process. These languages may have variants, in which case the need arises to deal with language families rather than with individual languages. However, specifying the syntax and semantics of each language variant separately...

Conversational agents, or chatbots, have become popular to access all kind of software services. They provide an intuitive natural language interface for interaction, available from a wide range of channels including social networks, web pages, intelligent speakers or cars. In response to this demand, many chatbot development platforms and tools ha...

One of the most time‐consuming task for teachers is creating and correcting exercises to evaluate students. This is normally performed by hand, which incurs high time costs and is error‐prone. A way to alleviate this problem is to provide an assistant tool that automates such tasks. In the case of exercises based on diagrams, they can be represente...

Creating and grading exercises are recurring tasks within higher education. When these exercises are based on diagrams – like logic circuits, automata or class diagrams – we can represent them as models, and use model-driven engineering techniques for the large-scale generation of quizzes, which can be automatically graded. This way, we propose a...

Mutation testing is a valuable technique for measuring the quality of test suites in terms of detecting faults. However, one of its main drawbacks is its high computational cost. For this purpose, several approaches have been recently proposed to speed-up the mutation testing process by exploiting computational resources in distributed systems. How...

Model-driven engineering (MDE) uses models as first-class artefacts during the software development lifecycle. MDE often relies on domain-specific languages (DSLs) to develop complex systems. The construction of a new DSL implies a deep understanding of a domain, whose relevant knowledge may be scattered in heterogeneous artefacts, like XML documen...

Petri nets are commonly used to represent concurrent systems. However, they lack support for modelling and analysing system families, like variants of controllers, different variations of a process model, or the possible configurations of a flexible assembly line. To facilitate modelling potentially large collections of similar systems, in this pap...

Modelling is central to many disciplines in engineering and the natural and social sciences. A wide variety of modelling languages and tools have been proposed along the years, traditionally for static environments such as desktops and laptops. However, the availability of increasingly powerful mobile devices makes it possible to profit from their...

The last few years have witnessed a significant growth of so-called low-code development platforms (LCDPs) both in gaining traction on the market and attracting interest from academia. LCDPs are advertised as visual development platforms, typically running on the cloud, reducing the need for manual coding and also targeting non-professional program...

During the development of a software project, different developers collaborate on creating and changing models. These models evolve and need to be versioned. Over the past several years, progress has been made in offering dedicated support for model versioning that improves on what is being supported by text-based version control systems. However,...

We are witnessing an increasing interest in building recommender systems (RSs) for all sorts of Software Engineering activities. Modelling is no exception to this trend, as modelling environments are being enriched with RSs that help building models by providing recommendations based on previous solutions to similar problems in the same domain. How...

The creation and correction of exercises are two of the most time-consuming tasks performed by teachers. When done by hand, they are error-prone, too. Several approaches have been devised to automate such tasks. In the case of exercises based on diagrams, we can represent them as models, generate a set of variations – called mutants – and automate...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are complex physical systems interacting with a considerable number of distributed computing elements for monitoring , control and management. They are currently becoming larger as Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems (CPSoS), since many industrial companies are transitioning their complex systems of systems to software-in...

During the last decade, the research community has developed different simulation tools to model and study cloud systems. However, current cloud simulators focus on specific features that typically do not fully cover all aspects of the cloud infrastructure. The ever-growing number of existing simulators increases the difficulty to properly choose t...

Modelling is an essential activity in software engineering. It typically involves two meta-levels: one includes meta-models that describe modelling languages, and the other contains models built by instantiating those meta-models. Multi-level modelling generalizes this approach by allowing models to span an arbitrary number of meta-levels. A scenar...

Any analysis produces results to be used by analysis users to understand and improve the system being analysed. But what are the ways in which analysis results can be exploited? And how is exploitation of analysis results related to analysis composition? In this chapter, we provide a conceptual model of analysis-result exploitation and a model of t...

This chapter presents AnATLyzer—a tool for the static analysis of the ATL model transformation language. AnATLyzer is able to statically detect more than 50 types of problems in ATL transformation programs using different analysis techniques, some of them used in combination as per Challenge 2 (integrating and orchestrating analysis tools, cf. Chap...

Mutation testing (MT) targets the assessment of test cases by measuring their efficiency to detect faults. This technique involves modifying the program under test to emulate programming faults, and assessing whether the existing test cases detect such mutations. MT has been extensively studied since the 70’s, and many tools have been proposed for...

Chatbots are agents that enable the interaction of users and software by means of written or spoken natural language conversation. Their use is growing, and many companies are starting to offer their services via chatbots, e.g., for booking, shopping or customer support. For this reason, many chatbot development tools have emerged, which makes choo...

Chatbots are programs that supply services to users via conversation in natural language, acting as virtual assistants within social networks or web applications. Companies like Google, IBM, Microsoft or Amazon have released chatbot development tools with different functionalities, capabilities, approaches and pricing models. With so many options,...

Petri nets are a popular formalism to represent concurrent systems. However, their standard form does not offer variability support to model and effectively analyse large sets of variants of a given system. For this purpose, we propose a notion of product line of Petri nets to represent a set of similar concurrent systems. The formalization enriche...

Models are the central assets in model-driven engineering (MDE), as they are actively used in all phases of software development. Models are built using metamodel-based languages, and so objects in models are typed by a metamodel class. This typing is static, established at creation time, and cannot be changed later. Therefore, objects in MDE are c...

Chatbots are software services accessed via conversation in natural language. They are increasingly used to help in all kinds of procedures like booking flights, querying visa information or assigning tasks to developers. They can be embedded in webs and social networks, and be used from mobile devices without installing dedicated apps. While many...

Scalability in modeling has many facets, including the ability to build larger models and domain-specific languages (DSLs) efficiently. With the aim of tackling some of the most prominent scalability challenges in model-based engineering (MBE), the MONDO EU project developed the theoretical foundations and open-source implementation of a platform f...

Chatbots are software programs with a conversational user interface, typically embedded in webs or messaging systems like Slack, Facebook Messenger or Telegram. Many companies are investing in chatbots to improve their customer support. This has led to a proliferation of chatbot creation platforms (e.g., Dialogflow, Lex, Watson). However, there is...

In software engineering, mutation consists in injecting small changes in artefacts – like models, programs, or data – for purposes like (mutation) testing, test data generation, and all sorts of search-based methods. These activities normally require the definition of sets of mutation operators, which are often built ad-hoc because there is current...

Conversational interfaces (also called chatbots) are being increasingly adopted in various domains such as e-commerce or customer service, as a direct communication channel between companies and end-users. Their advantage is that they can be embedded within social networks, and provide a natural language (NL) interface that enables their use by non...

Currently, using conventional techniques for checking and optimising the energy consumption in cloud systems is unpractical, due to the massive computational resources required. An appropriate test suite focusing on the parts of the cloud to be tested must be efficiently synthesised and executed, while the correctness of the test results must be ch...

Software engineering uses models throughout most phases of the development process. Models are defined using modelling languages. To make these languages applicable to a wider set of scenarios and customizable to specific needs, researchers have proposed using product lines to specify modelling language variants. However, there is currently a lack...

Modelling is an essential activity in software engineering processes. It typically involves two meta-levels: one includes meta-models that describe modelling languages, and the other contains models built by instantiating those meta-models. Multi-level modelling generalizes this approach by allowing models to span an arbitrary number of meta-levels...

Model transformations are essential elements of model-driven engineering (MDE) solutions, as they enable the automatic manipulation of models. MDE promotes the creation of domain-specific metamodels, but without proper reuse mechanisms, model transformations need to be developed from scratch for each new metamodel. In this paper, our goal is to und...

In software engineering, mutation consists in injecting small changes in artefacts - like models, programs, or data - for purposes like (mutation) testing, test data generation, and all sorts of search-based methods. These activities normally require the definition of sets of mutation operators, which are often built ad-hoc because there is curren...

Model driven Engineering (MDE) advocates the active use of models throughout the different software development phases. In MDE, models are described using meta-models, one meta-level above. This approach effectively leaves developers with one single meta-level to create their models. However, there are scenarios where the use of multiple meta-level...

Background: The use of chatbots has increased considerably in recent years. These are used in different areas and by a wide variety of users. Due to this fact, it is essential to incorporate usability in their development. Aim: Our objective is to identify the state-of-the-art in chatbot usability and applied human–computer interaction techniques,...

Like any other software artifact, models evolve and need to be versioned. In the last few years, dedicated support for model versioning has been proposed to improve the default text-based versioning that version control systems offer. However, there is still the need to comprehend model differences in terms of the semantics of the modeling language...

Mutation testing (MT) is a well-known technique to evaluate and improve the quality of a given test-suite. While several MT tools exist for traditional programming languages, there is no common method to take advantage of MT in the case of domain-specific languages (DSLs). The current MT tools for DSLs are created ad-hoc, incurring in a high cost....

Model transformations are key elements of model-driven engineering, where they are used to automate the manipulation of models. However, they are typed with respect to concrete source and target meta-models, making their reuse for other (even similar) meta-models challenging. To improve this situation, we propose capturing the typing requirements f...

During the last few years, computer performance has reached a turning point where computing power is no longer the only important concern. This way, the emphasis is shifting from an exclusive focus on the optimisation of the computing system to optimising other systems, like the memory system. Broadly speaking, testing memory systems entails two ma...

Context Model-driven engineering (MDE) promotes the active use of models in all phases of software development. Even though models are at a high level of abstraction, large or complex systems still require building monolithic models that prove to be too big for their processing by existing tools, and too difficult to comprehend by users. While modu...

Business process modelling is an essential activity for competitive enterprises, as it enables documenting, analysing, improving and automating their core processes. Several notations have been proposed, including BPMN, service blueprints or Process Chain Networks (PCNs). These are all graphical, intuitive notations, which are useful for discussion...

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are heavily used in model-driven and end-user development approaches. Compared to general-purpose languages, DSLs present numerous benefits like powerful domain-specific primitives, an intuitive syntax for domain experts, and the possibility of advanced code generation for narrow domains. While a graphical syntax is...