No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Developing software from scratch is a high cost and errorprone activity. A possible solution to reduce time-to-market and produce high quality software is the reuse of existing software. But when the number of features in the system grows, the maintenance becomes more complex. In such cases, to adopt a systematic approach, such as Software Product Line Engineering, is necessary. Existing systems are generally migrated to a product line, allowing systematic reuse of artefacts and easing maintenance. To this end, some approaches have been proposed in the literature in the last years. A mapping of works on this subject and the identification of some research gaps can lead to an improvement of such approaches. This paper describes the main outcomes of a systematic mapping study on the evolution and migration of systems to SPL. The main works found are presented and classified according to adopted strategy, artefacts used, and evaluation conducted. Analysis of the evolution along the past years are also presented. At the end, we summarize some trends and open issues to serve as reference to new researches.

No abstract

No abstract

Context: Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is the research field where Software Engineering (SE) problems are modelled as search problems to be solved by search-based techniques. The Symposium on Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE) is the premier event on SBSE, which had its 11 th edition in 2019. Objective: In order to better understand the characteristics and evolution of papers published at SSBSE, this work reports results from a mapping study targeting the proceedings of all SSBSE editions. Despite the existing mapping studies on SBSE, our contribution in this work is to provide information to researchers and practitioners willing to enter the SBSE field, being a source of information to strengthen the symposium, guide new studies, and motivate new collaboration among research groups. Method: A systematic mapping study was conducted with a set of four research questions, in which 134 studies published in all editions of SSBSE, dated from 2009 to 2019, were evaluated. In a fifth question, 32 papers published in the challenge track were summarised. Results: Throughout the years, 290 authors from 25 countries have contributed to the main track of the symposium, with the collaboration of at least two institutions in 46.3% of the papers. SSBSE papers have got substantial external visibility, as most citations are from different venues. The SE tasks addressed by SSBSE are mostly related to software testing, software debugging, software design, and maintenance. Evolutionary algorithms are present in 75% of the papers, being the most common search technique. The evaluation of the SBSE approaches usually includes industrial systems. Conclusions: SSBSE has helped increase the popularity of SBSE in the SE research community and has played an important role on making SBSE mature. There are still problems and challenges to be addressed in the SBSE field, which can be tackled by SSBSE authors in further studies.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a practice widely adopted in the industry to allow frequent integration of code changes. During the CI process, many test cases are executed multiple times a day, subject to time constraints. In this scenario, a learning-based approach, named COLEMAN, has been successfully applied. COLEMAN allows earlier execution of the most promising test cases to reveal faults. This approach considers CI particularities such as time budget and volatility of test cases, related to the fact that test cases can be added/removed along the CI cycles. In the CI of Highly Configuration System (HCS), many product variants must be tested, each one with different configuration options, but having test cases that are common to or reused from other variants. In this context, we found, by analogy, another particularity, the volatility of variants, that is, some variants can be included/discontinued along CI cycles. Considering this context, this work introduces two strategies for the application of COLEMAN in the CI of HCS: the Variant Test Set Strategy (VTS) that relies on the test set specific for each variant, and the Whole Test Set Strategy (WST) that prioritizes the test set composed by the union of the test cases of all variants. Both strategies are evaluated in a real-world HCS, considering three test budgets. The results show that the proposed strategies are applicable regarding the time spent for prioritization. They perform similarly regarding early fault detection, but WTS better mitigates the problem of beginning without knowledge, and is more suitable when a new variant to be tested is added. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → Experimentation; • Software and its engineering → Software product lines; Software testing and debugging.