Xavier Franch

Polytechnic University of Catalonia | UPC · Department of Service and Information System Engineering (ESSI)

[Context and motivation] User reviews published in mobile app repositories are essential for understanding user satisfaction and engagement within a specific market segment. [Question/problem] Manual analysis of reviews is impractical due to the large data volume, and automated analysis faces challenges like data synthesis and reporting. This compl...

Background The usage of complex artificial intelligence (AI) models demands expensive computational resources. While currently, available high-performance computing environments can support such complexity, the deployment of AI models in mobile devices, which is an increasing trend, is challenging. Environments with low computational resources impl...

Knowledge bases are centralized repositories used for developing knowledge-oriented information systems. They are essential for adaptive, specialized knowledge in dialogue systems, supporting up-to-date domain-specific discussions with users. However, designing large-scale knowledge bases presents multiple challenges in data collection and knowledg...

Background When using deep learning models, one of the most critical vulnerabilities is their exposure to adversarial inputs, which can cause wrong decisions ( e.g ., incorrect classification of an image) with minor perturbations. To address this vulnerability, it becomes necessary to retrain the affected model against adversarial inputs as part of...

Nowadays, AI-based systems have achieved outstanding results and have outperformed humans in different domains. However, the processes of training AI models and inferring from them require high computational resources, which pose a significant challenge in the current energy efficiency societal demand. To cope with this challenge, this research pro...

Current research in the computer vision field mainly focuses on improving Deep Learning (DL) correctness and inference time performance. However, there is still little work on the huge carbon footprint that has training DL models. This study aims to analyze the impact of the model architecture and training environment when training greener computer...

Task-oriented chatbots relying on a knowledge base for domain-specific content exploitation have been largely addressed in research and industry applications. Despite this, multiple challenges remain to be fully conquered, including adaptive knowledge mechanisms, personalization for user-specific demands, and composite intent resolution. To address...

Team-based software development projects (TBSDP) are a useful instrument to expose students to teamwork in an industry-like working context. However, TBSDP exposes students to a number of challenges. This paper has a twofold objective. First, understand the practices and challenges that students face in TBDSP in an Agile context. Second, investigat...

The rise of machine learning (ML) systems has exacerbated their carbon footprint due to increased capabilities and model sizes. However, there is scarce knowledge on how the carbon footprint of ML models is actually measured, reported, and evaluated. In light of this, the paper aims to analyze the measurement of the carbon footprint of 1,417 ML mod...

Requirements specification is a core activity in the requirements engineering phase of a software development project. Researchers have contributed extensively to the field of requirements specification, but the extent to which their proposals have been adopted in practice remains unclear. We gathered evidence about the state of practice in require...

When space missions plan scientific actions for robotic spacecraft to execute, they frequently do so within a geometric context called an opportunity. Although there are geometric software libraries that let users write code to search for opportunities, they require knowledge of algorithms and imperative programming languages, which is a condition...

[Context] Study replication is essential for theory building and empirical validation. [Problem] Despite its empirical vocation, requirements engineering (RE) research has given limited attention to study replication, threatening thereby the ability to verify existing results and use previous research as a baseline. [Solution] In this perspective p...

Context and motivation: AI-based systems (i.e., systems integrating some AI model or component) are becoming pervasive in society. A number of characteristics of AI-based systems challenge classical requirements engineering (RE) and raise questions yet to be answered. Question: This vision paper inquires the role that RE should play in the developm...

The evaluation of Deep Learning models has traditionally focused on criteria such as accuracy, F1 score, and related measures. The increasing availability of high computational power environments allows the creation of deeper and more complex models. However, the computations needed to train such models entail a large carbon footprint. In this work...

As the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is increasingly growing, their evolution becomes more challenging in terms of the service provided according to consumers’ needs. In this paper, we address the role of consumers’ needs in WAPIs evolution and introduce a process mining pattern-based method to support providers in WAPIs evolutio...

Automated program repair (APR) aims to automatize the process of repairing software bugs in order to reduce the cost of maintaining software programs. Moreover, the success (given by the accuracy metric) of APR approaches has been increasing in recent years. However, no previous work has considered the energy impact of repairing bugs automatically...

Architecting AI-based systems entails making some decisions that are particular to this type of systems. Therefore, it becomes necessary to gather all necessary knowledge to inform such decisions, and to articulate this knowledge in a form that facilitates knowledge transfer among different AI projects. In this exploratory paper, we first present t...

Background: When using deep learning models, there are many possible vulnerabilities and some of the most worrying are the adversarial inputs, which can cause wrong decisions with minor perturbations. Therefore, it becomes necessary to retrain these models against adversarial inputs, as part of the software testing process addressing the vulnerabil...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Sciences, RCIS 2022, which took place in Barcelona, Spain, during May 17–20, 2022. It focused on the special theme "Ethics and Trustworthiness in Information Science".

AI-based systems are software systems with functionalities enabled by at least one AI component (e.g., for image-, speech-recognition, and autonomous driving). AI-based systems are becoming pervasive in society due to advances in AI. However, there is limited synthesized knowledge on Software Engineering (SE) approaches for building, operating, and...

The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks, the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, ha...

Issue trackers, such as Jira, have become the prevalent collaborative tools in software engineering for managing issues, such as requirements, development tasks, and software bugs. However, issue trackers inherently focus on the lifecycle of single issues, although issues have and express dependencies on other issues that constitute issue dependenc...

Context In despite of agile and rapid software development (ARSD) being researched and applied extensively, managing quality requirements (QRs) are still challenging. As ARSD processes produce a large amount of data, measurement has become a strategy to facilitate QR management. Objective This study aims to survey the literature related to QR mana...

iStar2.0 provides a recommendation for the core constructs defined in the i* language, which are articulated around a metamodel. When applying iStar2.0 to a particular domain, it can be necessary to extend this metamodel in order to represent more specialized concepts. One of these domains is that of data structures, as implementation of abstract d...

The significant momentum and importance of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) in Software Engineering (SE) has fostered new opportunities and challenges for extensive empirical research. However, MSR researchers seem to struggle to characterize the empirical methods they use into the existing empirical SE body of knowledge. This is especially the c...

Most computer science curricula include a compulsory course on data structures. Students are prone to memorise facts about data structures instead of understanding the essence of underlying concepts. This can be explained by the fact that learning the basics of each data structure, the difference with each other, and the adequacy of each of them to...

Context: Tertiary studies are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering as an instrument to synthesise evidence on a research topic in a systematic way. In order to understand and contextualize their findings, it is important to assess the quality of the selected secondary studies. Objective: This paper aims to provide a state of the ar...

Background: The construction, evolution and usage of complex artificial intelligence (AI) models demand expensive computational resources. While currently available high-performance computing environments support well this complexity, the deployment of AI models in mobile devices, which is an increasing trend, is challenging. Mobile applications co...

The significant momentum and importance of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) in Software Engineering (SE) has fostered new opportunities and challenges for extensive empirical research. However, MSR researchers seem to struggle to characterize the empirical methods they use into the existing empirical SE body of knowledge. This is especially the c...

Context: Tertiary studies in software engineering (TS@SE) are widely used to synthesise evidence on a research topic systematically. As part of their protocol, TS@SE define inclusion and exclusion criteria (IC/EC) aimed at selecting those secondary studies (SS) to be included in the analysis. Aims: To provide a state of the art on the definition an...

Ubiquitous digitalization has led to the continuous generation of large amounts of digital data, both in organizations and in society at large. In the requirements engineering community, there has been a growing interest in considering digital data as new sources for requirements elicitation, in addition to stake-holders. The volume, dynamics, and...

Modern services and applications need to react to changes in their context (e.g. location, memory consumption, number of users) to improve the user’s experience. To obtain this context, a monitoring infrastructure with adequate functionality and quality levels is required. But this monitoring infrastructure needs to react to the context as well, ra...

The use of natural language interfaces in the field of human-computer interaction is undergoing intense study through dedicated scientific and industrial research. The latest contributions in the field, including deep learning approaches like recurrent neural networks, the potential of context-aware strategies and user-centred design approaches, ha...

The use of web Application Programming Interfaces (WAPIs) has experienced a boost in recent years. Developers (i.e., WAPI consumers) are continuously relying on third-party WAPIs to incorporate certain features into their applications. Consequently, WAPI evolution becomes more challenging in terms of the service provided according to consumers’ nee...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Context . The use of standards is considered a vital part of any engineering discipline. So one could expect that standards play an important role in Requirements Engineering (RE) as well. However, little is known about the actual knowledge and use of...

Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry. Our objective is to inves...

The requirements engineer role is defined differently within most organizations.

Context: The use of standards is considered a vital part of any engineering discipline. So one could expect that standards play an important role in Requirements Engineering (RE) as well. However, little is known about the actual knowledge and use of RE-related standards in industry. Objective: In this article, we investigate to which extent standa...

Companies dealing with Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in Autonomous Systems (AS) face several problems, such as users’ lack of trust in adverse or unknown conditions, gaps between software engineering and AI model development, and operation in a continuously changing operational environment. This work-in-progress paper aims to close the gap be...

Mobile applications have become a commodity in multiple daily scenarios. Their increasing complexity has led mobile software ecosystems to become heterogeneous in terms of hardware specifications, features and context of use, among others. For their users, fully exploiting their potential has become challenging. While enacting software systems with...

A Web API (WAPI) is a type of API whose interaction with its consumers is done through the Internet. While being accessed through the Internet can be challenging, mostly when WAPIs evolve, it gives providers the possibility to monitor their usage. Currently, WAPI usage is mostly logged for traffic monitoring and troubleshooting. Even though they co...

AI-based systems are software systems with functionalities enabled by at least one AI component (e.g., for image- and speech-recognition, and autonomous driving). AI-based systems are becoming pervasive in society due to advances in AI. However, there is limited synthesized knowledge on Software Engineering (SE) approaches for building, operating,...

Software reference architectures have played an essential role in software systems development due to the possibility of knowledge reuse. Although increasingly adopted by industry, these architectures are not yet completely understood. This work presents a panorama on existing software reference architectures, characterizing them according to their...

Context: Managing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in software projects is challenging, and projects that adopt Model-Driven Development (MDD) are no exception. Although several methods and techniques have been proposed to face this challenge, there is still little evidence on how NFRs are handled in MDD by practitioners. Knowing more about the s...

A Web API (WAPI) is a type of API whose interaction with its consumers is done through the Internet. While being accessed through the Internet can be challenging, mostly when WAPIs evolve, it gives providers the possibility to monitor their usage, and understand and analyze consumers' behavior. Currently, WAPI usage is mostly logged for traffic mon...

When building Deep Learning (DL) models, data scientists and software engineers manage the trade-off between their accuracy, or any other suitable success criteria, and their complexity. In an environment with high computational power, a common practice is making the models go deeper by designing more sophisticated architectures. However, in the co...

Agile methods can deliver software that fulfills customer needs rapidly and continuously. Quality requirements (QRs) are important in this regard; however, detailed studies on how companies applying agile methods to manage QRs are limited, as are studies on the rationale for choosing specific QR management practices and related challenges. The aim...

Data-driven approaches are becoming dominant in almost every single software engineering activity, and requirements engineering is not the exception. The analysis of data coming from several sources may indeed become an extremely useful input to requirements elicitation and management. However, benefits do not come for free. Techniques such as natu...

Context. Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry. Objective. We in...

Issue trackers, such as Jira, have become the prevalent collaborative tools in software engineering for managing issues, such as requirements, development tasks, and software bugs. However, issue trackers inherently focus on the life-cycle of single issues although issues have and express dependencies on other issues that constitute an issue depend...

Background: Quality requirements (QRs) describe desired system qualities, playing an important role in the success of software projects. In the context of agile software development (ASD), where the main objective is the fast delivery of functionalities, QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed during the development process. Software analy...

Software and data analytics solutions support improving development processes and the quality of the software produced in Agile Software Development (ASD). However, decision makers in software teams (e.g., product owner, project manager) are demanding powerful tools providing evidence data that support their strategic decision-making processes. In...

Space missions need software in order to be aware of the occurrence of geometric events in different phases of their project lifecycle. However, current software packages that provide capabilities to search for geometric events might lack desirable software qualities such as extensibility and reusability, and some conflate the definition of events...

Context Exploiting software development related data from software-development intensive organizations to support tactical and strategic decision making is a challenge. Combining data-driven approaches with expert knowledge has been highlighted as a sensible approach for leading software-development intensive organizations to rightful decision-maki...

italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Context : The relevance of Requirements Engineering (RE) research to practitioners is vital for a long-term dissemination of research results to everyday practice. Some authors have speculated about a mismatch between research and practice in the RE di...

In our interactions with the Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) software, we recognized how its ability to search for geometric events in space is a need for robotic space missions in general. To satisfy this need, we propose the Tychonis framework, which is built upon the principles of: (1) separations of concerns, (2) extensibility, (3) reusabili...

Current Self-Adaptive Systems (SASs) such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are systems able to deal with highly complex contexts. However, due to the use of static feedback loops they are not able to respond to unanticipated situations such as sensor faults. Previously, we have proposed HAFLoop (Highly Adaptive Feedback control Loop), an architecture f...

The relevance of Requirements Engineering (RE) research to practitioners is vital for a long-term dissemination of research results to everyday practice. Some authors have speculated about a mismatch between research and practice in the RE discipline. However, there is not much evidence to support or refute this perception. This paper presents the...

Context Over the last decade, Agile methods have changed the software development process in an unparalleled way and with the increasing popularity of Big Data, optimizing development cycles through data analytics is becoming a commodity. Objective Although a myriad of research exists on software analytics as well as on Agile software development...

Summary of the tutorial given at RCIS'20. Published as part of the back matter of the proceedings. Cite as: Franch, X.: Data-Driven Requirements Engineering: Principles, Methods and Challenges. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2020). LNBIP 385: 625-626, Springer, 2020.

Quality requirements (QRs) are a key artifact needed to ensure the quality and success of a software system. Despite their importance, QRs rarely get the same degree of attention as their functional counterpart in agile software development (ASD) projects. Moreover, crucial information that can be obtained from software development repositories (e....

Context. Situational Method Engineering (SME) is the discipline that aims at the systematic definition of methods adapted to specific contexts of use (situations). The use of goal-oriented methods for supporting SME is an active research line where the iStar 2.0 language is applied. Objective. We plan to conduct an experiment to investigate some de...

This paper explores the use of the i* language as a notation to describe data structures to be used in classical imperative programs written in e.g. Java or C#. Data structures are described at two levels of abstraction, their specification and their implementation (the data structure properly said). We analyze how iStar 2.0, enriched with both mod...

Context: Agile software development has become commonplace in software development companies due to the numerous benefits it provides. However, conducting Agile projects is demanding in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), because projects start and end quickly, but still have to fulfil customers’ quality requirements. Objective: This paper aims at...

[Context and motivation] Modern software engineering processes have shifted from traditional upfront requirements engineering (RE) to a more continuous way of conducting RE, particularly including data-driven approaches. [Question/problem] However, current research on data-driven RE focuses more on leveraging certain techniques such as natural lang...

[Context and motivation] Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirements engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements and, as a consequence, obtain requirements specifications of better quality through more effective engineering processes. [Question/problem] Regardless the impact requirements reu...

Context: Autonomous Systems (ASs) are becoming increasingly pervasive in today's society. One reason lies in the emergence of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions that boost the ability of ASs to self-adapt in increasingly complex and dynamic environments. Companies dealing with AI models in ASs face several problems, such as users'...

Context:Quality requirements (QRs) describe the desired quality of software, and they play an important role in the success of software projects. In agile software development (ASD), QRs are often ill-defined and not well addressed due to the focus on quickly delivering functionality. Rapid software development (RSD) approaches (e.g., continuous de...