Systematic Knowledge Engineering: Building Bodies of Knowledge from Published Research

Abstract

Context. Software engineering researchers conduct systematic literature reviews (SLRs) to build bodies of knowledge (BoKs). Unfortunately, relevant knowledge collected in the SLR process is not publicly available, which considerably slows down building BoKs incrementally.Objective. We present and evaluate the Systematic Knowledge Engineering (SKE) process to support e±ciently building BoKs from published research.Method. SKE is based on the SLR process and on Knowledge Engineering practices to build a Knowledge Base (KB) by reusing intermediate data extraction results from SLRs. We evaluated the feasibility of applying SKE by building a Software Inspection BoK KB from published experiments and a Software Product Line BoK KB from published experience reports. We compared the e®ort, bene¯ts, and risks of building BoK KBs regarding the SKE and the traditional SLR processes.Results. The application of SKE for incrementally collecting and organizing knowledge in the context of a BoK was feasible for di®erent domains and di®erent types of evidence. While the e®orts for conducting the SKE and traditional SLR processes are comparable, SKE provides signi¯cant bene¯ts for building BoKs.Conclusions. SKE enables researchers in a scienti¯c community to reuse and incrementally build knowledge in a BoK. SKE is ready to be evaluated in other software engineering domains.

Towards Building Knowledge on Causes of Critical Requirements Engineering Problems

“…Future work also comprises: (a) considering more NaPiRE data (from different countries) to build the knowledge on common causes based on a larger cross-company dataset, (b) further exploring other data gathered as part of the NaPiRE Brazil survey, such as RE problem mitigation actions, and (c) integrating the overall survey results into an empirical software engineering body of knowledge [22].…”

Open BOK on Software Engineering Educational Context: A Systematic Literature Review

“…In the scientific literature, there is a great number of researches works on the knowledge description for Open BOK. For example, in [15], a BOK is built upon published research, [16] describes a BOK that has been modeled for software development, [17] shows representation and scientific reasoning used for the description of knowledge, [18] shows different elements needed to describe a given knowledge in engineering, and [19][20][21] show the usage of skills, attitudes, abilities, and capabilities to describe knowledge for BOK.…”

Infraestrutura para um Corpo de Conhecimento em Melhoria de Processos de Software Baseado no MR-MPS-SW

“…As principais contribuições referentes à concepção da infraestrutura apresentada neste trabalho são: (i) um processo simples que permite a atualização do conhecimento de maneira incremental, o MPS-BoK-P, definido através de uma especialização do SKE [Biffl and Kalinowski and Rabiser and et al 2014] combinada com definições fornecidas por KUHRMANN et al [Kuhrmann et al 2015]; (ii) um modelo de domínio capaz de representar o MR-MPS-SW e informações associados aos seus elementos de modo a satisfazer as necessidades de profissionais (conforme definido em [Jedlitschka et al 2014]); (iv) uma planilha para extração das informações das publicações de acordo com o modelo definido (ativo do processo MPS-BoK-P); e (v) uma ferramenta para organizar e disponibilizar conhecimento resultante de diferentes execuções deste processo, integrando informações sobre as tecnologias automaticamente e provendo mecanismos de busca textual utilizando recursos de operadores booleanos além de consulta através dos elementos do MR-MPS-SW.…”