Vahid Garousi

Queen's University Belfast | QUB · School Of Electronics, Electrical Engineering And Computer Science

With the development of different technologies, the use and importance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems continue to increase daily. In parallel with this increasing use, a lot of research is being done to successfully complete ERP implementation projects. However, despite these researches, reported case studies show that the success ra...

Test Maturity Model integration (TMMi) is a popular model for maturity assessment and capability improvement of software testing practices in industry. Originally inspired by the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and managed by the TMMi Foundation, the TMMi specification provides guidelines for assessing and improving testing capabiliti...

Realizing desired properties “by construction” is a highly appealing goal in the design of safety-critical embedded systems. As verification and validation tasks in this domain are often both challenging and time-consuming, the by-construction paradigm is a promising solution to increase design productivity and reduce design errors. In the XANDAR p...

Context More than 78 countries have developed COVID contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, a large number of reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. Objective Our goal is to gain insights into the user reviews of those...

Farm management information system (FMIS) is an important element of precision agriculture to support the decision making process in the agricultural business. Developing FMIS is not trivial and requires the proper design and implementation models for supporting the understandability, enhancing communication and analysis of the design decisions, an...

The next generation of networked embedded systems (ES) necessitates rapid prototyping and high performance while maintaining key qualities like trustworthiness and safety. However, development of safety-critical ES suffers from complex software (SW) toolchains and engineering processes. Moreover, the current trend in autonomous systems, which relie...

More than 64 countries and regions have, so far, developed COVID-19 contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, between a few hundred to a few thousand reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. In this paper, we mine insights f...

Objectives Our goal was to gain insights into the user reviews of the three COVID-19 contact-tracing mobile apps, developed for the different regions of the UK: ‘NHS COVID-19’ for England and Wales, ‘StopCOVID NI’ for Northern Ireland and ‘Protect Scotland’ for Scotland. Our two research questions are (1) what are the users’ experience and satisfac...

In parallel to academic (peer-reviewed) literature (e.g., journal and conference papers), an enormous extent of grey literature (GL) has accumulated since the inception of software engineering (SE). GL is often defined as “literature that is not formally published in sources such as books or journal articles”, e.g., in the form of trade magazines,...

In the context of a software testing company, we have deployed the model-based testing (MBT) approach to take the company’s test automation practices to higher levels of maturity and capability. We have chosen, from a set of open-source/commercial MBT tools, an open-source tool named GraphWalker, and have pragmatically used MBT for end-to-end test...

In the context of a large software testing company, we have deployed the model-based testing (MBT) approach to take the company's test automation practices to higher levels of maturity /and capability. We have chosen, from a set of open-source/commercial MBT tools, an open-source tool named GraphWalker, and have pragmatically used MBT for end-to-en...

Test Maturity Model integration (TMMi) is a popular model for maturity assessment and capability improvement of software testing practices in industry. Originally inspired by the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and managed by the TMMi Foundation, the TMMi specification provides detailed guidelines for assessing and improving testing c...

Context: More than 50 countries have developed COVID contact-tracing apps to limit the spread of coronavirus. However, many experts and scientists cast doubt on the effectiveness of those apps. For each app, a large number of reviews have been entered by end-users in app stores. Objective: Our goal is to gain insights into the user reviews of those...

There has been a recent push to increase the practical relevance and impact of software engineering (SE) research. Even though many practitioners and researchers agree that this change is desirable, only some concrete actions have been taken in the community so far. In this paper, we present our experience in a large number of collaborative researc...

Background: Retrieving and mining practitioners' self{reports of their professional experience of software practice could provide valuable evidence for research. We are, however, unaware of any existing reviews of research conducted in this area. Objective: To review and classify previous research, and to identify insights into the challenges resea...

While Behavior-driven development (BDD) tools such as Cucumber are powerful tools for automated testing, they have certain limitations. For example, they often enforce strict syntax for test cases, like the “Given-When-Then” format, which may not always be easy to write for a given test case. A new test automation framework named Gauge (gauge.org)...

Background: Retrieving and mining practitioners' self--reports of their professional experience of software practice could provide valuable evidence for research. We are, however, unaware of any existing reviews of research conducted in this area. Objective: To review and classify previous research, and to identify insights into the challenges rese...

To learn about novel software engineering (SE) trends, where do you refer to? In order to document and disseminate their experience / knowledge, many SE practitioners prepare technical materials and share them online as blog posts, white papers and videos. Such materials are often called “grey literature” because they are not formally peer reviewed...

Video game development is a complex endeavor, often involving complex software, large organizations, and aggressive release deadlines. Several studies have reported that periods of “crunch time” are prevalent in the video game industry, but there are few studies on the effects of time pressure. We conducted a survey with participants of the Global...

Researchers generally place the most trust in peer-reviewed, published information, such as journals and conference papers. By contrast, software engineering (SE) practitioners typically do not have the time, access, or expertise to review and benefit from such publications. As a result, practitioners are more likely to turn to other sources of inf...

In this paper, we provide a multivocal literature review of Function as a Service (FaaS) infrastructures. FaaS is an important, emerging category of cloud computing, which requires that software applications are designed and deployed using distributed, highly-decoupled service-based architectures, one example of which is the microservices architect...

Scrum is the most widely used agile development framework that guides the development process with its ability to create customer-valued software artifacts iteratively and incrementally, whilst seeking best practices to provide continuous measurement during production. However, measuring success in Scrum can be a challenging endeavor. In particular...

Context: While many companies conduct their software testing activities in-house, many other companies outsource their software testing needs to other firms who act as software testing service providers. As a result, Testing as a Service (TaaS) has emerged as a strong service industry in the last several decades. In the context of software testing...

Context: Visual GUI testing (VGT) is referred to as the latest generation GUI-based testing. It is a tool-driven technique, which uses image recognition for interacting with and asserting the behavior of the system under test. Motivated by the industrial need of a large Turkish software and systems company providing solutions in the areas of defens...

Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There have been regular discussions in the SE community on this issue since the 1980’s, led by pioneers such as Robert Glass. As we recently passed the milestone of “50 years of software engineering”, some recent positive efforts have been made in this direction, e.g., es...

Context: To reduce manual effort of extracting test cases from natural-language requirements, many approaches based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been proposed in the literature. Given the large amount of approaches in this area, and since many practitioners are eager to utilize such techniques, it is important to synthesize and provide...

Background: The maturity of practices and infrastructure in the health care domain directly impacts the quality and efficiency of health care services. Therefore, various health care administrations (e.g. from hospital management to the nationwide health authority) need to assess and improve their operational maturity. Objective: This study aime...

Context: With the rising complexity and scale of software systems, there is an ever-increasing demand for sophisticated and cost-effective software testing. To meet such a demand, there is a need for a highly-skilled software testing work-force (test engineers) in the industry. To address that need, many university educators worldwide have included...

According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with indu...

Development of scientific and engineering software is usually different and could be more challenging than the development of conventional enterprise software. The authors were involved in a technology-transfer project between academia and industry which focused on engineering, development and testing of a software for optimization of pumping energ...

Context : With the rising complexity and scale of software systems, there is an ever-increasing demand for sophisticated and cost-effective software testing. To meet such a demand, there is a need for a highly-skilled software testing work-force (test engineers) in the industry. To address that need, many university educators worldwide have include...

Context: Software testing is an important and costly software engineering activity in the industry. Despite the efforts of the software testing research community in the last several decades, various studies show that still many practitioners in the industry report challenges in their software testing tasks. Objective: To shed light on industry’s...

For a highly relevant and applied research area like software testing industry-academia collaboration is of uttermost importance. In this paper we reflect on how industry-academia collaboration can be improved based on evidence from four empirical studies. We therefore first present four studies providing evidence on the (1) perceived level of chal...

Researchers generally place the most trust in peer-reviewed, published information, such as journals and conference papers. By contrast, software engineering (SE) practitioners typically do not have the time, access or expertise to review and benefit from such publications. As a result, practitioners are more likely to turn to other sources of info...

Context: Knowledge level, quality, and productivity of software engineering (SE) workforce are the subject of regular dis-cussions among practitioners, educators, and researchers. There have been many efforts to measure and improve the knowledge gap between SE education and industrial needs. Objective: Although the existing efforts for aligning SE...

Context: Knowledge level and productivity of the software engineering (SE) workforce are the subject of regular discussions among practitioners, educators, and researchers. There have been many efforts to measure and improve the knowledge gap between SE education and industrial needs. Objective: Although the existing efforts for aligning SE educat...

Context: Maturity of practices and infrastructure in healthcare domain directly impacts the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. Therefore, various healthcare administrations (e.g., hospital management to nation-wide health authority) need to assess and improve their operational maturity. Objective: This study aims to review and classify...

Context: According to various reports, many software engineering (SE) graduates often face difficulties when beginning their careers, which is mainly due to misalignment of the skills learned in university education with what is needed in the software industry. Objective: Our objective is to perform a meta-analysis to aggregate the results of the s...

Many factors could affect the number of citations to a paper. Citations have an important role in research policy and in measuring the excellence of research and researchers. This work is the first study in software engineering (SE) to assess multiple factors affecting the number of citations to SE papers. We use (a) negative binomial regression an...

Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps ensure the industrial relevance of academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners in the community believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE) research is rela...

In the context of a large Turkish software and systems company involved in the aviation and defense domain, there was a need for automated testing of simulation software, e.g., flight and helicopter simulators. Since no suitable existing test solution was found to be used for this purpose, an in-house test solution was developed. This presents the...

Video game development is a complex endeavor, often involving complex software, large organizations, and aggressive release deadlines. Several studies have reported that periods of "crunch time" are prevalent in the video game industry, but there are few studies on the effects of time pressure. We conducted a survey with participants of the Global...

Software engineering researchers have, over the years, proposed different critical success factors (CSFs) which are believed to be critically correlated with the success of software projects. To conduct an empirical investigation into the correlation of CSFs with success of software projects, we adapt and extend in this work an existing contingency...

According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with indu...

Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There has been a debate on this issue in the community since 1980's by pioneers such as Robert Glass and Colin Potts. As we pass the milestone of "50 Years of Software Engineering", some recent positive efforts have been made in this direction, e.g., establishing "industr...

Context: Software testability is the degree to which a software system or a unit under test supports its own testing. To predict and improve software testability, a large number of techniques and metrics have been proposed by both practitioners and researchers in the last several decades. Reviewing and getting an overview of the entire state-of-the...

Regression testing is needed when a software or the environment hosting that software changes. Motivated by a real-world industrial need in the context of a large financial (banking) corporation in Turkey, the authors and their colleagues developed and introduced an automated regression testing infrastructure for automated testing of one of the mai...

As a type of anti-pattern, test smells are defined as poorly-designed tests and their presence negatively affects the quality of test suites and production code. There is a large body of knowledge on the subject of test smells. Thus, it is not practical for practitioners and researchers to synthesize and benefit from such a large literature. Motiva...

Software-intensive embedded systems have become an essential aspect of our lives. To cope with its growing complexity, modeling and model-driven engineering (MDE) are widely used for analysis, design, implementation, and testing of these systems. Since a large variety of software modeling practices is used in the domain of embedded software, it is...

Context: A Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) is a form of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) which includes the grey literature (e.g., blog posts, videos and white papers) in addition to the published (formal) literature (e.g., journal and conference papers). MLRs are useful for both researchers and practitioners since they provide summaries bot...

To cost-effectively test embedded software, practitioners and researchers have proposed many test techniques, approaches, tools, and frameworks. However, obtaining an overview of the state of the art and state of the practice in this area is challenging for practitioners or new researchers. In addition, owing to an inadequate overview of what alrea...

Context: Embedded systems have overwhelming penetration around the world. Innovations are increasingly triggered by software embedded in automotive, transportation, medical-equipment, communication, energy, and many other types of systems. To test embedded software in an effective and efficient manner, a large number of test techniques, approaches,...

Context: To reduce manual effort of extracting test cases from natural-language requirements, many approaches based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been proposed in the literature. Given the large number of approaches in this area, and since many practitioners are eager to utilize such techniques, it is important to synthesize and provide...

Context Executing an entire regression test-suite after every code change is often costly in large software projects. To cope with this challenge, researchers have proposed various regression test-selection techniques. Objective This paper was motivated by a real industrial need to improve regression-testing practices in the context of a safety-cri...

Human factors have an important effect on performance of software teams and resulting software products. One of the seldom-studied aspects of human factors is the effect of personality-based team formation on team cohesion and quality of the software product. In this study, we investigate the above effect by conducting an exploratory case study dur...

As a type of anti-pattern, test smells are defined as poorly designed tests and their presence may negatively affect the quality of test suites and production code. Test smells are the subject of active discussions among practitioners and researchers, and various guidelines to handle smells are constantly offered for smell prevention, smell detecti...