arXiv subjects

Mohamed Soliman

Publications and source records attributed to Mohamed Soliman.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Exploring Web Search Engines to Find Architectural Knowledge

Software engineers need relevant and up-to-date architectural knowledge (AK), in order to make well-founded design decisions. However, finding such AK is quite challenging. One pragmatic approach is to search for AK on the web using traditional search engines (e.g. Google); this is common practice among software engineers. Still, we know very little about what AK is retrieved, from where, and how useful it is. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study with 53 software engineers, who used Google to make design decisions using the Attribute-Driven-Design method. Based on how the subjects assessed the nature and relevance of the retrieved results, we determined how effective web search engines are to find relevant architectural information. Moreover, we identified the different sources of AK on the web and their associated AK concepts.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Understanding Architecture Erosion: The Practitioners' Perceptive

As software systems evolve, their architecture is meant to adapt accordingly by following the changes in requirements, the environment, and the implementation. However, in practice, the evolving system often deviates from the architecture, causing severe consequences to system maintenance and evolution. This phenomenon of architecture erosion has been studied extensively in research, but not yet been examined from the point of view of developers. In this exploratory study, we look into how developers perceive the notion of architecture erosion, its causes and consequences, as well as tools and practices to identify and control architecture erosion. To this end, we searched through several popular online developer communities for collecting data of discussions related to architecture erosion. Besides, we identified developers involved in these discussions and conducted a survey with 10 participants and held interviews with 4 participants. Our findings show that: (1) developers either focus on the structural manifestation of architecture erosion or on its effect on run-time qualities, maintenance and evolution; (2) alongside technical factors, architecture erosion is caused to a large extent by non-technical factors; (3) despite the lack of dedicated tools for detecting architecture erosion, developers usually identify erosion through a number of symptoms; and (4) there are effective measures that can help to alleviate the impact of architecture erosion.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Identification and Remediation of Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Trackers

Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code comments (termed as self-admitted technical debt or SATD). But SATD in issue trackers is relatively unexplored. We performed a case study, where we manually examined 500 issues from two open source projects (i.e. Hadoop and Camel), which contained 152 SATD items. We found that: 1) eight types of technical debt are identified in issues, namely architecture, build, code, defect, design, documentation, requirement, and test debt; 2) developers identify technical debt in issues in three different points in time, and a small part is identified by its creators; 3) the majority of technical debt is paid off, 4) mostly by those who identified it or created it; 5) the median time and average time to repay technical debt are 872.3 and 25.0 hours respectively.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2011

Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction

We present a generic framework to make wrapper induction algorithms tolerant to noise in the training data. This enables us to learn wrappers in a completely unsupervised manner from automatically and cheaply obtained noisy training data, e.g., using dictionaries and regular expressions. By removing the site-level supervision that wrapper-based techniques require, we are able to perform information extraction at web-scale, with accuracy unattained with existing unsupervised extraction techniques. Our system is used in production at Yahoo! and powers live applications.

cs.DB↗