arXiv subjects

Vinicius dos Santos

Publications and source records attributed to Vinicius dos Santos.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Open Educational Resources: Barriers and Open Issues

Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely available teaching and learning materials, such as textbooks, videos, and interactive games, that can be used, reused, adapted, and shared. OER can leverage access, collaboration, and innovation in education; however, their adoption and long-term use remain limited. Motivated by this issue, this manuscript examined the literature and identified 26 social, economic, and technical barriers that hinder teachers, students, and institutions from creating, using, and maintaining OER. These barriers were evaluated through semi-structured interviews with experts to ensure their understandability, correctness, completeness, and relevance. We adopted a four-step research method: (1) a tertiary study that identified barriers from 26 secondary studies; (2) analysis and classification of the barriers according to social, economic, and technical dimensions and the OER lifecycle activities they affect; (3) design of the conceptual model to represent relationships among OER elements, barriers, and mitigation actions; and (4) evaluation through expert interviews. These barriers are also illustrated using a real-world OER. The findings provide insights for the education community, supporting inclusive strategies, institutional actions, and public policies to reduce social, economic, and technical barriers to OER. By addressing factors that affect accessibility, sustainability, and equitable participation, this manuscript advances universal access to educational resources and fosters more inclusive educational ecosystems.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

String Matching with a Dynamic Pattern

In this work, we tackle a natural variation of the String Matching Problem on the case of a dynamic pattern, that is, given a static text $T$ and a pattern $P$, we want to support character additions and deletions to the pattern, and after each operation compute how many times it occurs in the text. We show a simple and practical algorithm using Suffix Arrays that achieves $\mathcal O(\log |T|)$ update time, after $\mathcal O(|T|)$ preprocess time. We show how to extend our solution to support substring deletion, transposition (moving a substring to another position of the pattern), and copy (copying a substring and pasting it in a specific position), in the same time complexities. Our solution can also be extended to support an online text (adding characters to one end of the text), maintaining the same amortized bounds.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2025

Towards a Maturity Model for Systematic Literature Review Process

Systematic literature reviews (SLR) have been increasingly conducted in software engineering and they provide significant benefits in terms of summarizing the state of the research. The process of conducting SLR is complex, involving several activities and consuming considerable effort and time from researchers. Researchers often skip or poorly conduct essential activities, which introduce threats to validity, resulting in lower-quality SLR. But researchers are often unaware of what they could do to mature their SLR process, thus improving the SLR quality. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a maturity model for the SLR process named MM4SLR. To this end, we were inspired by well-known models like CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration). We first identified 39 key practices for SLR from the literature and grouped them into nine goals that were further grouped into five process areas. We then organized the process areas into five maturity levels which compose our model. Our proof of concept, applying the MM4SLR to four published SLR showed that the MM4SLR is suitable for appraising SLR and can identify important flaws in SLR quality. MM4SLR can therefore support researchers in creating their SLR processes and selecting practices that could be adopted to mature their processes.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging Sustainable Systematic Literature Reviews

Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are a widely employed research method in software engineering. However, there are several problems with SLRs, including the enormous time and effort to conduct them and the lack of obvious impacts of SLR results on software engineering practices and industry projects. To address these problems, the concepts of \textit{sustainability} and \textit{sustainable SLR} have been proposed, aiming to raise awareness among researchers about the importance of dealing with SLR problems in a consistent way; however, practical and concrete actions are still lacking. This paper presents concrete directions towards sustainable SLRs. We first identified 18 ``green drivers'' (GD) that could directly impact SLR sustainability, and we distilled 25 sustainability indicators (SI) associated with the GD to assess SLRs regarding their sustainability. A preliminary evaluation was conducted on the ten top-cited SLRs in software engineering published over the last decade. From this analysis, we synthesized our insights into 12 leverage points for sustainability. Our results indicate that even in high-quality reviews, there are threats to sustainability, such as: flaws in the search process, lack of essential details in the documentation, weak collaboration with stakeholders, poor knowledge management, lack of use of supporting tools, and a dearth of practical insights for software engineering practitioners. The good news is that moving towards sustainable SLRs only requires some simple actions, which can pave the way for a profound change in the software engineering community's mindset about how to create and sustain SLRs.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

Benefits and Drawbacks of a Graduate Course: An Experience Teaching Systematic Literature Review

Graduate courses can provide specialized knowledge for Ph.D. and Master's students and contribute to develop their hard and soft skills. At the same time, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been increasingly adopted in the computing area as a valuable technique to synthesize the state of the art of a given research topic. However, there is still a poor understanding of the real benefits and drawbacks of offering the SLR course for graduate students. This paper reports an experience that examines such benefits and drawbacks, the difficulties for professors (i.e., educators), and the essential SLR topics to be taught as well as a way to better teach them. We also surveyed computer science graduate students who attended the SLR course, which we have offered for almost ten years for Ph.D. and Master's students in our institution. We found the attendance to the SLR course is a valuable opportunity for graduate students to conduct the required deep literature review of their research topic, improve their research skills, and increase their formation. Hence, we recommend that Ph.D. and Masters' programs offer the SLR course to contribute to their academic achievement.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2021

Towards Sustainability of Systematic Literature Reviews

Background: The software engineering community has increasingly conducted systematic literature reviews (SLR) as a means to summarize evidence from different studies and bring to light the state of the art of a given research topic. While SLR provide many benefits, they also present several problems with punctual solutions for some of them. However, two main problems still remain: the high time-/effort-consumption nature of SLR and the lack of an effective impact of SLR results in the industry, as initially expected for SLR. Aims: The main goal of this paper is to introduce a new view - which we name Sustainability of SLR - on how to deal with SLR aiming at reducing those problems. Method: We analyzed six reference studies published in the last decade to identify, group, and analyze the SLR problems and their interconnections. Based on such analysis, we proposed the view of Sustainability of SLR that intends to address these problems. Results: The proposed view encompasses three dimensions (social, economic, and technical) that could become SLR more sustainable in the sense that the four major problems and 31 barriers (i.e., possible causes for those problems) that we identified could be mitigated. Conclusions: The view of Sustainability of SLR intends to change the researchers' mindset to mitigate the inherent SLR problems and, as a consequence, achieve sustainable SLR, i.e., those that consume less time/effort to be conducted and updated with useful results for the industry.

cs.SE↗