Oscar Díaz

Oscar Díaz
University of the Basque Country | UPV/EHU · Computer Languages and Systems

PhD.

About

209
Publications
37,755
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2,985
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2006 - December 2012
University of the Basque Country
Position
  • University of the Basque Country

Publications

Publications (209)
Preprint
Full-text available
The increasing volume of research paper submissions poses a significant challenge to the traditional academic peer-review system, leading to an overwhelming workload for reviewers. This study explores the potential of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into the peer-review process to enhance efficiency without compromising effectiveness. We f...
Preprint
Full-text available
Implicit feedback is collecting information about software usage to understand how and when the software is used. This research tackles implicit feedback in Software Product Lines (SPLs). The need for platform-centric feedback makes SPL feedback depart from one-off-application feedback in both the artefact to be tracked (the platform vs the variant...
Chapter
The Web Accessibility Guidelines are designed to help developers ensure that web content is accessible to all users. These guidelines provide the foundation for evaluation tools that automate inspection processes. However, due to the heterogeneity of these guidelines and the subjectivity involved in their evaluation, humans are still necessary for...
Conference Paper
Concept maps are widely used in education and business. They are reckoned to stimulate the generation of ideas, facilitate requirement elicitation, and serve as the first step in ontology building, and as such, they are used by a wide variety of practitioners, including designers, engineers, instructors, and others, to organize and structure knowle...
Chapter
Research Question (RQ) Scoping refers to defining and refining a research question before conducting research. This step is crucial for ensuring the relevance and focus of the study, particularly in Design Science Research (DSR), where problems and solutions develop gradually. Literature reviews are a traditional method for comprehending the proble...
Article
Contribution: Instructors are leveraging open-source software (OSS) as a way to experience authentic examples of software problems with their students. Recommender engines might assist students in selecting the right project based on metrics mined from project repositories (e.g., GitHub). This vision is realized through GitMate, a GitHub-based reco...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Teachers have successfully applied concept maps in educational settings. In particular, concept maps have been recognized as an effective tool for diagnosing students' misunderstandings. Frequently, students create concept maps from reading materials that teachers provide to develop the necessary background to draw the map. However, when it comes t...
Article
Full-text available
Empirical Software Engineering rests on the understanding of practical problems and their solution counterparts. Frequently, solutions are not absolute but relative to the context where the problem is observed. This tends to imply that the solution and the problem unveil gradually together, and hence, researchers are not always in the position to s...
Article
Full-text available
Context Variant-Rich Systems (VRSs), such as Software Product Lines or variants created through clone & own, are created to satisfy different needs while reusing existing assets. The long lifespan of families of variants, and the scale of both the technical side (implementation size) and the organizational side (roles diversity) make their maintena...
Conference Paper
Onboarding (i.e., the process of incorporating new people) is relevant because it introduces employees to their role, the company’s culture, and what the company has to offer. Onboarding is then dependent on the company’s culture and practices. When it comes to software development, these practices include the methods, the tools or the developers’...
Article
A significant amount of research project funding is spent creating customized annotation systems, re-inventing the wheel once and again, developing the same common features. In this paper, we present WACline, a Software Product Line to facilitate customization of browser extension Web annotation clients. WACline reduces the development effort by re...
Conference Paper
The accumulation of the design knowledge (DK) resulting from Design Science Research (DSR) requires other DSR researchers to appropriate, use, evaluate, modify, and/or extend prior DSR artifacts. Unfortunately, much DK (especially software artifacts) is never appropriated by other researchers for further DSR activity. The lack of take-up of DSR out...
Article
Full-text available
Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim at systematically reusing software assets, and deriving products (a.k.a., variants) out of those assets. However, it is not always possible to handle SPL evolution directly through these reusable assets. Time-to-market pressure, expedited bug fixes, or product specifics lead to the evolution to first happen at the...
Article
Capstone projects usually represent the most significant academic endeavor with which students have been involved. Time management tends to be one of the hurdles. On top, University students are prone to procras-tinatory behavior. Inexperience and procrastination team up for students failing to meet deadlines. Supervisors strive to help. Yet heavy...
Conference Paper
With a volatile labour and technological market, onboarding is becoming increasingly important. The process of incorporating a new developer, a.k.a. the newcomer, into a software development team is reckoned to be lengthy, frustrating and expensive. Newcomers face personal, interpersonal, process and technical barriers during their incorporation, w...
Preprint
With a volatile labour and technological market, onboarding is becoming increasingly important. The process of incorporating a new developer, a.k.a. the newcomer, into a software development team is reckoned to be lengthy, frustrating and expensive. Newcomers face personal, interpersonal, process and technical barriers during their incorporation, w...
Conference Paper
DSR literature raises concerns about Design Knowledge (DK) accumulation across distinct projects. We believe that DK and the artifact(s) that fleshes it out, are the two sides of the same coin, to the extent that, for DK accumulation to thrive, DSR artifacts should come along. On these premises, and with a focus on software artifacts, we advocate f...
Article
Linked Data Wrappers (LDWs) turn Web APIs into RDF end-points, leveraging the Linked Open Data cloud with current data. Unfortunately, LDWs are fragile upon upgrades on the underlying APIs, compromising LDW stability. Hence, for API-based LDWs to become a sustainable foundation for the Web of Data, we should recognize LDW maintenance as a continuou...
Conference Paper
FeatureCloud is a git client for the visualization of evolution in annotated SPL, i.e. those resorting to ifdefs for variability. Specifically, FeatureCloud (1) mines git repositories; (2) extracts ifdefs; (3) works out differences between two versions of the same ifdefs; (4) abstracts ifdefs in terms of their code churn, tangling and scattering; a...
Chapter
Peer review is under pressure. Demand for reviews is outstripping supply where reviewers tend to be busy people who contribute voluntarily. Authors highly value reviews, yet complain about the time it takes to get feedback to the point of putting research timeliness at stake. Though part of the review process has been moved to the Web, the review i...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are increasingly popular to categorize and identify research gaps. Their reliability largely depends on the rigour of the attempt to identify, appraise and aggregate evidences through coding, i.e. the process of examining and organizing the data contained in primary studies in order to answer the research questi...
Article
Full-text available
This study conducts a mapping study to survey the landscape of health chatbots along three research questions: What illnesses are chatbots tackling? What patient competences are chatbots aimed at? Which chatbot technical enablers are of most interest in the health domain? We identify 30 articles related to health chatbots from 2014 to 2018. We anal...
Conference Paper
SPL product customers might not always wait for the next core asset release. When an organization aims to react to market events, quick bug fixes or urgent customer requests, strategies are needed to support fast adaptation, e.g. with product-specific extensions, which are later propagated into the SPL. This leads to the grow-and-prune model where...
Conference Paper
This work introduces a set of quality attributes for chatbots. The selection is grounded on scholarly but also reputed blog references from 2016 and 2017. In addition, attributes should be amenable to be extracted (semi) automatically. On these premises, we consider four attributes: "support of a minimal set of common commands", "foresee language v...
Chapter
“Strategic reading” is a term coined to conceive reading as a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text. While reading, individuals use their prior knowledge along with clues from the text to construct meaning, and place the new knowledge within this frame. Strategic reading is then a pivotal ability for conceptual modelers, more so...
Article
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) emphasizes the systematic use of models to improve software productivity and some aspects of the software quality such as maintainability or interoperability. Model-driven techniques have proven useful not only as regards developing new software applications but also the reengineering of legacy systems. Models and met...
Conference Paper
Migrating a set of product variants to a managed SPL is rarely a one-shot effort. Experiences from industry revealed that a complete migration to an SPL might take years, during which customers' requirements still need to be fulfilled by the company (customization effort). Analyzing the assets that have been customized by products (customization an...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter presents Web Augmentation (WA) technologies as tools and techniques for end-user development. WA technologies differ from other web development technologies as they target at improving existing Web pages and not at creating new Web sites. These improvements can deeply alter the way users use and interact with Web sites. This chapter re...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Web locators uniquely identify elements on the Web Content. They are heavily used in different scenarios, from Web harvesting to Web testing and browser extensions. Locators' Achilles heel is their fragility upon Website upgrades. This work tackles locator fragility in the context of browser extensions. We introduce regenerative locator, i.e. tradi...
Conference Paper
Learning and conducting Design Science Research (DSR) are complex undertakings, for which there is little assistance other than publications describing how to do them. They include many activities which must be mastered and coordinated, sometimes when doing them for the first time. This paper describes a new tool, DScaffolding, developed to support...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Reading literature is important, but problematic. In Quora and other PhD forums, students moan about their frustrating reading and literature review experiences. Strategic reading might help. This term is coined to conceive of reading as a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text in a targeted way. The fact that strategic reading is...
Conference Paper
Web appropriation implies adapting a web application to the user’s practice in ways that might not be conceived by the application designers. This might need to be conducted by the application’s users themselves. This requires for appropriation to be described at an adequate level of abstraction. This paper explores first steps in using Query By Ex...
Article
User Acceptance Testing (UAT) involves validating software in a real setting by the intended audience. The aim is not so much to check the defined requirements but to ensure that the software satisfies the customer’s needs. Agile methodologies put stringent demands on UAT, if only for the frequency at which it needs to be conducted due to the itera...
Article
Get the full-text free here (before Nov 2016): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121216301510 CONTEXT. Software Product Lines (SPLs) aim to support the development of a whole family of software products through systematic reuse of shared assets. As SPLs exhibit a long life-span, evolution is an even greater concern than for sin...
Chapter
Modding refers to the act of modifying hardware, software, or virtually anything else, to perform a function not originally conceived or intended by the designer. The rationales for modding should be sought in the aspiration of users to contextualize to their own situation the artefact at hand. Websites are not exception. WebMakeup targets mod scen...
Thesis
Full-text available
Data Engineering is the Computer Science discipline concerned with the principles, techniques, methods and tools to support the data management in the software development. Data are normally stored in database management systems (e.g. Relational, Object-oriented or NoSQL) and Data Engineering has been mainly focused on relational data so far, altho...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
SPLs distinguish between domain engineering (DE) and application engineering (AE). Though each realm has its own lifecycle, they might need to be regularly synchronized to avoid SPL erosion during evolution. This introduces two sync paths: update propagation (from DE to AE ) and feedback propagation (from AE to DE). This work looks at how to suppor...
Conference Paper
SPLs distinguish between domain engineering (DE) and application engineering (AE). Though each realm has its own lifecycle, they might need to be regularly synchronized to avoid SPL erosion during evolution. This introduces two sync paths: update propagation (from DE to AE) and feedback propagation (from AE to DE). This work looks at how to support...
Conference Paper
Linked-Data Wrappers (LDWs) have been proposed to integrate Open APIs into the linked-data cloud. A main stumbling block is maintenance: LDWs need to be kept in sync with the APIs they wrap. Hence, LDWs are not single-shot efforts, but sustained endeavors that developers might not always afford. As a result, it is not uncommon for third-party LDWs...
Conference Paper
Wikis promote work to be reviewed after publication, not before. This vision might not always fit organizations where a common employee concern is that sharing work-in-progress may negatively affect the assessments they receive. This might lead users to edit in distress, thus affecting task performance, and may minimize their participation in wikis...
Article
Full-text available
Today's web personalization technologies use approaches like user categorization, configuration, and customization but do not fully support individualized requirements. As a significant portion of our social and working interactions are migrating to the web, we can expect an increase in these kinds of minority requirements. Browser-side transcoding...
Book
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of Current Trends in Web Engineering, ICWE Workshops 2015 which was held in June 2015 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The 16 revised full papers were selected form 23 submissions and cover topics on natural language processing for informal text, pervasive Web technologies, tre...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The increasing volume of content and actions available on the Web, combined with the growing number of mature digital natives, anticipate a growing desire of controlling the Web experience. Akin to the Web2.0 movement, webies’ desires do not stop at content authoring but look for controlling how content is arranged in websites. By content, we mainl...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Resumen. La Ingeniería del Software Dirigida por Modelos (MDE) pro-mueve la utilización sistemática de modelos para mejorar el nivel de abstracción en la construcción de software y con ello proporcionar mejo-ras significativas en la productividad. Las técnicas MDE además de serútiles ser´serútiles para automatizar cualquier etapa del ciclo de vida...
Article
Model transformation development is a complex task. Therefore, having mechanisms for transformation testing and understanding becomes a matter of utmost importance. Understanding, among others, implies being able to trace back bugs to their causes. In model transformations, causes can be related with either the input model or the transformation cod...
Conference Paper
One of Web2.0 hallmarks is the empowerment of users in the transit from consumers to producers. So far, the focus has been on content: text, video or pictures on the Web has increasingly a layman’s origin. This paper looks at another Web functionality, cross publishing, whereby items in one website might also impact on sister websites. The Like and...
Conference Paper
Forward Engineering advocates for code to be generated dynamically through model-to-text transformations that target a specific platform. In this setting, platform evolution can leave the transformation, and hence the generated code, outdated. This issue is exacerbated by the perpetual beta phenomenon in Web 2.0 platforms where continuous delta rel...
Article
Increasingly, a user's action in a website might have an impact in other websites. The Like and ShareThis buttons are forerunners of this tendency whereby websites strive to influence and be influenced by the actions of their users in the websphere. The term Web Radar is coined to denote software that serves to impact a website (the host) from what...
Article
The organisation of corporate wikis tends to deteriorate as time goes by. Rearranging categories, structuring articles and even moving sections among articles are cumbersome tasks in current wiki engines. This discourages the layman. But, it is the layman who writes the articles, knows the wiki content and detects refactoring opportunities. Our goa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Micro logging is emerging as a suitable means for question-answering in working settings. This leads to different efforts to seamlessly integrate microblogging into the daily-used tools. Specifically, microblogging is being regarded as particularly useful during software development, akin to the tradition of Q&A forums. This paper looks at a partic...
Conference Paper
Form-intensive Web applications are common among institutions that collect bulks of data in a piecemeal fashion. European funding programs or income tax return illustrate these scenarios. Very often, most of this data is already digitalized in terms of documents, spreadsheets or databases. The task of manually filling Web forms out of these resourc...
Conference Paper
The engineering of software-intensive systems is supported by a variety of development tools. While development tools are traditionally desktop tools, they are more and more complemented and replaced by web-based development tools. The resulting blend of desktop and web-based tools is difficult to integrate into a seamless tool chain, which support...
Conference Paper
This paper looks into the sharing of end-user software (referred to as “script”). Based on this study four implications are drawn: reduce the effort to make scripts shareable, minimize deployment burdens, less stringent protection mechanisms, and tap into communities of practice as for sharing. To attend these implications, we introduce a URL-based...
Article
Full-text available
Web augmentation is to the Web what augmented reality is to the physical world: layering relevant content/layout/navigation over the existing Web to customize the user experience. This is achieved through JavaScript (JS) using browser weavers (e.g., Greasemonkey). To date, over 43 million of downloads of Greasemonkey scripts ground the vitality of...
Conference Paper
The Web is becoming a main conduit for our daily activities. When an activity expands across different websites, the user is left alone in the effort to aggregate the resources and services required in carrying out these cross-site activities. This results in a lost of focus, and constant switching among websites. The problem is that these webflows...
Article
Full-text available
Data rather than functionality are the sources of competitive advantage for Web2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs and social networking websites. This valuable information might need to be capitalized by third-party applications or be subject to migration or data analysis. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) can be used for these purposes. However, M...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Model transformations are precious and effortful outcomes of Model-Driven Engineering. As any other artifact, transformations are also subject to evolution forces. Not only are they affected by changes to transformation requirements, but also by the changes to the associated metamodels. Manual co-evolution of transformations after these metamodel c...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Wikipedia is a successful example of collaborative knowledge construction. This can be synergistically complemented with personal knowledge construction whereby individuals are supported in their sharing, experimenting and building of information in a more private setting, without the scrutiny of the whole community. Ideally, both approaches should...
Conference Paper
Reading Wikipedia is the entry to more involved activities such as editing. However, the jump from reading to editing could be too big for some wikipedians who can be intimidated by exposing their content to public scrutiny. Annotating might foster not only reading but also be the prelude to editing. Different annotation tools exist for the Web (e....
Conference Paper
Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactoring. So far, wiki refactoring is a manual, time-consuming and error-prone activity since refactoring is conducted at the same level that editing: the article. This results in no performant wikis and the frequent abandon of wiki projects. We argue that r...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Open innovation and collaborative development are attracting considerable attention as new software construction models. Traditionally, website code is a "wall garden" hidden from partners. In the other extreme, you can move to open source where the entirety of the code is disclosed. A middle way is to expose just those parts where collaboration mi...
Conference Paper
The increasing volume of content and actions on the web, combined with the growing number of "digital natives", anticipate a growing desire of more sophisticated ways of controlling the Web experience. Webies 2.0 do no longer take the web as it is but imagine fancy ways of customizing the web for their own purposes. So far, mashups are the forerunn...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A critical aspect of mashup tools for end users is to come up with an intuitive metaphor. Sticklet is an augmentation-based mashup tool that conceives websites as walls where you can fix HTML fragments (sticky notes) from other websites. Notes are contextualized to the hosting website, i.e. location, parameter passing and layout should be harmonize...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Desktop tools are steadily being turned into web applications. Tool integration then becomes a question of website integration. This work uses Web Augmentation techniques for this purpose. An integration layer is deployed on top of the existing Web-based tools that augments the rendering of those tools for the integration experience. Layers are spe...
Conference Paper
Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to wiki degradation and the need for regular wiki refactoring. So far, wiki refactoring is a manual, time-consuming and error-prone activity. We strive to ease wiki refactoring by using mind maps as a graphical representation of the wiki structure, and mind map manipulations as a way to express refactoring. Th...
Article
Software Product Lines (SPLs) are not intended to create one application, but a number of them: a product family. In contrast to one-off development, SPLs are based on the idea that the distinct products of the family share a significant amount of assets. This forces a change in how software is developed. Likewise, software testing should mimic its...
Article
Full-text available
Wikis are main exponents of collaborative development by user communities. This community may be created around the wiki itself (e.g., community of contributors in Wikipedia) or already exist (e.g., company employees in corporate wikis). In the latter case, the wiki is not created in a vacuum but as part of the information ecosystem of the hosting...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Wikis' organic growth inevitably leads to a gradual degradation of the wiki content/structure which, in turn, may entail recurrent wiki refactoring. Unfortunately, no regression test exists to check the validity of the refactoring output. Some changes, even if compliant with good practices, can still require to be backed by the community which ends...