Fatma Başak Aydemir

Gökberk Çelikmasat, Atay Özgövde, Fatma Başak Aydemir

Domain models are central to software engineering, as they enable a shared understanding, guide implementation, and support automated analyses and model-driven development. Yet, despite these benefits, practitioners often skip modeling because it is time-consuming and demands scarce expertise. We address this barrier by investigating whether open-weight large language models, adapted via instruction tuning, can generate high-quality BPMN process models directly from natural language descriptions in a cost-effective and privacy-preserving way. We introduce InstruBPM, a reproducible approach that prepares paired text-diagram data and instruction tunes an open source large language model with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and quantization for on-prem deployment. We evaluate the tuned model through complementary perspectives: (i) text/code similarity using BLEU, ROUGE-L, and METEOR, (ii) structural fidelity using Relative Graph Edit Distance, (iii) guidelines conformance using external tool checks, and (iv) a small expert review. Using a curated subset of a multi-domain BPMN dataset, we compare the tuned model with untuned open-weight baselines and strong proprietary models under consistent prompting regimes. Our compact tuned model outperforms all baselines across sequence and structural metrics while requiring substantially fewer resources; guideline analysis and expert feedback further indicate that the generated diagrams largely follow BPMN best practices and are useful starting points that reduce modeling effort. Overall, instruction tuning improves structural accuracy and robustness compared to untuned baselines and reduces reliance on heavy prompt scaffolding. We publicly share the trained models and scripts to support reproducibility and further research.

Büşra Tabak, Fatma Başak Aydemir

Software issues contain units of work to fix, improve, or create new threads during the development and facilitate communication among the team members. Assigning an issue to the most relevant team member and determining a category of an issue is a tedious and challenging task. Wrong classifications cause delays and rework in the project and trouble among the team members. This paper proposes a set of carefully curated linguistic features for shallow machine learning methods and compares the performance of shallow and ensemble methods with deep language models. Unlike the state-of-the-art, we assign issues to four roles (designer, developer, tester, and leader) rather than to specific individuals or teams to contribute to the generality of our solution. We also consider the level of experience of the developers to reflect the industrial practices in our solution formulation. We collect and annotate five industrial data sets from one of the top three global television producers to evaluate our proposal and compare it with deep language models. Our data sets contain 5324 issues in total. We show that an ensemble classifier of shallow techniques achieves 0.92 for issue assignment in accuracy which is statistically comparable to the state-of-the-art deep language models. The contributions include the public sharing of five annotated industrial issue data sets, the development of a clear and comprehensive feature set, the introduction of a novel label set, and the validation of the efficacy of an ensemble classifier of shallow machine learning techniques.

Binnur Görer, Fatma Başak Aydemir

Elicitation interviews are the most common requirements elicitation technique, and proficiency in conducting these interviews is crucial for requirements elicitation. Traditional training methods, typically limited to textbook learning, may not sufficiently address the practical complexities of interviewing techniques. Practical training with various interview scenarios is important for understanding how to apply theoretical knowledge in real-world contexts. However, there is a shortage of educational interview material, as creating interview scripts requires both technical expertise and creativity. To address this issue, we develop a specialized GPT agent for auto-generating interview scripts. The GPT agent is equipped with a dedicated knowledge base tailored to the guidelines and best practices of requirements elicitation interview procedures. We employ a prompt chaining approach to mitigate the output length constraint of GPT to be able to generate thorough and detailed interview scripts. This involves dividing the interview into sections and crafting distinct prompts for each, allowing for the generation of complete content for each section. The generated scripts are assessed through standard natural language generation evaluation metrics and an expert judgment study, confirming their applicability in requirements engineering training.