Paulo Sérgio Medeiros Dos Santos

Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro · Departamento de Informática Aplicada

In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision-making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any scientific basis or well-grounded criteria, but on the opinions of experts. Experimental Software Engineering is of par...

Context: Several empirical studies investigated the benefits and drawbacks of acquiring a Software Reference Architecture (SRA) to construct a family of software systems with similar architectural needs. However, these empirical results have not been synthesized by any study yet. Such synthesized evidence is essential to make informed decisions whe...

As a community work, scientific contributions are usually built incrementally, involving some transformation, expansion or refutation of existing conceptual and propositional networks. As the body of knowledge increases, scientists concentrate more effort on ensuring that new hypotheses and observations are needed and consistent with previous findi...

Abstract Context Kanban is increasingly being used in diverse software organizations. There is extensive research regarding its benefits and challenges in Software Engineering, reported in both primary and secondary studies. However, these results have not been synthesized yet. Goal to investigate and identify the actual benefits and challenges of...

Research synthesis represents an essential element of the knowledge accumulation and application process, which is indispensable to any scientific field such as software engineering. In the case of the software engineering domain, the evidence is produced in both quantitative and qualitative forms, which challenges their combined analysis. Research...

Context Reading and understanding the source code are fundamental to supporting software programmers’ daily activities. Still, there is no agreement regarding the program attributes needed to achieve the readability and comprehensibility of source code. Objective To analyze the influence of comments presence, indentation spacing, identifiers lengt...

Study package containing raw and analyzed data from the work entitled "On the Investigation of Empirical Contradictions - Aggregated Results of Local Studies on Readability and Comprehensibility of Source Code"

Continuous Experimentation (CE) has become increasingly popular across industry and academic communities. Given its rapid evolution in software engineering (SE), the lack of a common understanding of CE can jeopardize new implementations and justify research efforts. Therefore, this literature study characterizes CE in SE based on its definitions,...

Multisensor information fusion brings challenges such as data heterogeneity, source precision, and the merger of uncertainties that impact the quality of classifiers. A widely used approach for classification problems in a multisensor context is the Dempster–Shafer Theory. This approach considers the beliefs attached to each source to consolidate t...

Context: As the adoption of continuous delivery practices increases in software organizations, different scenarios struggle to make it scales for their products in long-term evolution. This study looks at the concrete software architecture as a relevant factor for successfully achieving continuous delivery goals. Objective: This study aims to under...

The use of big data and information fusion in electronichealth records (EHR) allowed the identification of adversedrug reactions(ADR) through the integration of heteroge-neous sources such as clinical notes (CN), medication pre-scriptions, and pathological examinations. This heterogene-ity of data sources entails the need to address redundancy,conf...

A pandemia da COVID-19 trouxe mudanças na vida das pessoas e organizações. Nesse contexto, as TICs desempenham papel essencial para manutenção de diversas atividades. Esta pesquisa visa caracterizar o uso das TICs durante a pandemia de COVID-19, analisando como elas apoiam o trabalho colaborativo no setor de TI. Para isso, um survey foi realizado c...

With the evidence-based practice consolidation in Software Engineering, knowledge translation is receiving increased attention due to its importance to the identification of means to accelerate the capture of benefits and drawbacks from evidence of the state of the art and practice. However, although it is an essential knowledge translation element...

CONTEXT. Focus Group (FG) has been adopted to support researches in different areas, offering instruments to simultaneously collect qualitative data from a group of people. Even peopleware representing an important perspective in software engineering (SE), FG is not largely used to support empirical studies in the field due to lack of understanding...

Research synthesis is an essential instrument to consolidate scientific knowledge regarding the benefits and drawbacks of software technologies. However, conducting a research synthesis can be challenging given the amount of data and information to manage and aggregate. Furthermore, comparing and contrasting evidence besides keeping track of all ag...

This paper reports the experience of an architecture team of a software development department with 25 agile teams in supporting technical decisions regarding technical practices. The main motivation to use technical debt metaphor was its acknowledged potential in driving software development and maintenance decisions, especially those long term ma...

An adequate representation and a feasible aggregation procedure of evidence represents a challenging problem in many disciplines. The right representation can help scientists discuss and present the results of their findings and, if it is simple enough, it can be useful for practitioners to base their decisions on improvement implementations. The a...

This article describes an experimental evaluation of a checklist based inspection technique proposed in the literature and its insertion in a real project. The evaluation was conducted using a strategy that combines two experimental study types. First, a controlled study with graduate students aiming at preliminarily evaluate the checklist techniqu...

Refactoring plays a key role in maintaining the software product quality . However, refactoring decisions heavily rely on human factors because it depends on the examination of different characteristics present in the code structure. Aiming at investigating the characteristics which could affect devel-opers' refactoring decisions, an action-researc...

Refactoring plays a key role in maintaining the software product quality. However, refactoring decisions heavily rely on human factors because it depends on the examination of different characteristics present in the code structure. Aiming at investigating the characteristics which could affect developers' refactoring decisions, an action-research...

This paper presents a literature survey of action research (AR) studies published in nine major software engineering (SE) journals and three conference proceedings in the period 1993 to June 2009. A strict selection based on distinguishing SE from information systems research has identified 16 papers. Although they represent a very small fraction o...

Time-to-market and requirement volatility are critical factors for value creation within software development. Agile methodologies, such as Extreme Programming (XP), are based on communication, moderately sized projects and modest coding. As such, XP is open to technologies that could bring advantages on its values, principles and practices. This p...

This paper presents a literature survey of action research (AR) studies published in nine major Software Engineering (SE) journals and three conference proceedings in the period 1993 to June 2009. A strict selection based on distinguishing SE from Information Systems research has identified 16 papers. Although they represent a very small fraction o...

The process of human resources formation in Software Engineering (SE) as well as in other areas of Computer Science depends on the education knowledge. Considering SE, it is possible to identify efforts that are being accomplished by the community. However, in most of the cases, they represent isolated and localized initiatives, hindering their dif...

Experimental studies have been used as a mechanism to acquire knowledge through a scientific approach based on measurement of phenomena in different areas. However it is hard to run such studies when they require models (simulation), produce large amount of information, and explore science in large scale. In this case, a computerized infrastructure...

One of the benefits of Evidence Based Software Engineering is to support the adoption of technologies in the industry based on scientific know-ledge. Although some studies regarding defining methodologies for introducing software technologies in the industry have been conducted, there is still a gap represented by the lack of evidence from experime...

The Software Engineering (SE) research community has an important role in the process of human resources formation for the area. Efforts to improve SE education have been made by the community. However, obtained results often remain isolated and localized, being necessary to make a diagnosis and to put together what are the main problems, solutions...

Atualmente, a indústria de software tem conhecimento limitado sobre como software é projetado, construído e evoluído ao longo do tempo. Sente-se a necessidade de possuir modelos adequados para analisar processos e produtos de software; entender os limites das tecnologias de software em determinados contextos; e possuir habilidade de análise e de ex...

This paper describes our experience on building tools that support meta-descriptions activities in experimental software engineering environments. It aims at discuss how these tools have been used to help on the building of experimental software engineering environments. The experimental software engineering group at COPPE/UFRJ has been working wit...

This position paper describes an infrastructure to support activities in Experimentation Processs Definition and Planning phases. The purpose of this infrastructure is to provide a framework to allow the creation and filling of Experimental Plans during Experimentation Process enactment.

Currently most results about new software technologies (processes, methods, techniques and tools) are based on personal opinion or marketing. Experimentation can represent a systematic, disciplined and controlled approach to evaluate software processes and human technologies. Usually, executing experimental studies consumes time and produces a huge...