arXiv subjects

Tingting Bi

Publications and source records attributed to Tingting Bi.

22 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Architecture Information Communication in Two OSS Projects: the Why, Who, When, and What

Architecture information is vital for Open Source Software (OSS) development, and mailing list is one of the widely used channels for developers to share and communicate architecture information. This work investigates the nature of architecture information communication (i.e., why, who, when, and what) by OSS developers via developer mailing lists. We employed a multiple case study approach to extract and analyze the architecture information communication from the developer mailing lists of two OSS projects, ArgoUML and Hibernate, during their development life-cycle of over 18 years. Our main findings are: (a) architecture negotiation and interpretation are the two main reasons (i.e., why) of architecture communication; (b) the amount of architecture information communicated in developer mailing lists decreases after the first stable release (i.e., when); (c) architecture communications centered around a few core developers (i.e., who); (d) and the most frequently communicated architecture elements (i.e., what) are Architecture Rationale and Architecture Model. There are a few similarities of architecture communication between the two OSS projects. Such similarities point to how OSS developers naturally gravitate towards the four aspects of architecture communication in OSS development.

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arXiv2021

Mining Architecture Tactics and Quality Attributes Knowledge in Stack Overflow

Context: Architecture Tactics (ATs) are architectural building blocks that provide general architectural solutions for addressing Quality Attributes (QAs) issues. Mining and analyzing QA-AT knowledge can help the software architecture community better understand architecture design. However, manually capturing and mining this knowledge is labor-intensive and difficult. Objective: Using Stack Overflow (SO) as our source, our main goals are to effectively mine such knowledge; and to have some sense of how developers use ATs with respect to QA concerns from related discussions. Methods: We applied a semi-automatic dictionary-based mining approach to extract the QA-AT posts in SO. With the mined QA-AT posts, we identified the relationships between ATs and QAs. Results: Our approach allow us to mine QA-AT knowledge effectively with an F-measure of 0.865 and Performance of 82.2%. Using this mining approach, we are able to discover architectural synonyms of QAs and ATs used by designers, from which we discover how developers apply ATs to address quality requirements. Conclusions: We make two contributions in this work: First, we demonstrated a semi-automatic approach to mine ATs and QAs from SO posts; Second, we identified little-known design relationships between QAs and ATs and grouped architectural design considerations to aid architects make architecture tactics design decisions.

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arXiv2021

Accessibility in Software Practice: A Practitioner's Perspective

Being able to access software in daily life is vital for everyone, and thus accessibility is a fundamental challenge for software development. However, given the number of accessibility issues reported by many users, e.g., in app reviews, it is not clear if accessibility is widely integrated into current software projects and how software projects address accessibility issues. In this paper, we report a study of the critical challenges and benefits of incorporating accessibility into software development and design. We applied a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach for gathering data from 15 interviews and 365 survey respondents from 26 countries across five continents to understand how practitioners perceive accessibility development and design in practice. We got 44 statements grouped into eight topics on accessibility from practitioners' viewpoints and different software development stages. Our statistical analysis reveals substantial gaps between groups, e.g., practitioners have Direct v.s. Indirect accessibility relevant work experience when they reviewed the summarized statements. These gaps might hinder the quality of accessibility development and design, and we use our findings to establish a set of guidelines to help practitioners be aware of accessibility challenges and benefit factors. We also propose some remedies to resolve the gaps and to highlight key future research directions.

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arXiv2020

Predictive Models in Software Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities

Predictive models are one of the most important techniques that are widely applied in many areas of software engineering. There have been a large number of primary studies that apply predictive models and that present well-preformed studies and well-desigeworks in various research domains, including software requirements, software design and development, testing and debugging and software maintenance. This paper is a first attempt to systematically organize knowledge in this area by surveying a body of 139 papers on predictive models. We describe the key models and approaches used, classify the different models, summarize the range of key application areas, and analyze research results. Based on our findings, we also propose a set of current challenges that still need to be addressed in future work and provide a proposed research road map for these opportunities.

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