Hironori Washizaki

Haowei Cheng, Jati H. Husen, Yijun Lu et al.

Introduction: Requirements engineering faces challenges due to the handling of increasingly complex software systems. These challenges can be addressed using generative AI. Given that GenAI based RE has not been systematically analyzed in detail, this review examines related research, focusing on trends, methodologies, challenges, and future directions. Methods: A systematic methodology for paper selection, data extraction, and feature analysis is used to comprehensively review 238 articles published from 2019 to 2025 and available from major academic databases. Results: Generative pretrained transformer models dominate current applications (67.3%), but research remains unevenly distributed across RE phases, with analysis (30.0%) and elicitation (22.1%) receiving the most attention, and management (6.8%) underexplored. Three core challenges: reproducibility (66.8%), hallucinations (63.4%), and interpretability (57.1%) form a tightly interlinked triad affecting trust and consistency. Strong correlations (35% cooccurrence) indicate these challenges must be addressed holistically. Industrial adoption remains nascent, with over 90% of studies corresponding to early stage development and only 1.3% reaching production level integration. Conclusions: Evaluation practices show maturity gaps, limited tool and dataset availability, and fragmented benchmarking approaches. Despite the transformative potential of GenAI based RE, several barriers hinder practical adoption. The strong correlations among core challenges demand specialized architectures targeting interdependencies rather than isolated solutions. The limited deployment reflects systemic bottlenecks in generalizability, data quality, and scalable evaluation methods. Successful adoption requires coordinated development across technical robustness, methodological maturity, and governance integration.

Xingfang Wu, Heng Li, Nobukazu Yoshioka et al.

One goal of technical online communities is to help developers find the right answer in one place. A single question can be asked in different ways with different wordings, leading to the existence of duplicate posts on technical forums. The question of how to discover and link duplicate posts has garnered the attention of both developer communities and researchers. For example, Stack Overflow adopts a voting-based mechanism to mark and close duplicate posts. However, addressing these constantly emerging duplicate posts in a timely manner continues to pose challenges. Therefore, various approaches have been proposed to detect duplicate posts on technical forum posts automatically. The existing methods suffer from limitations either due to their reliance on handcrafted similarity metrics which can not sufficiently capture the semantics of posts, or their lack of supervision to improve the performance. Additionally, the efficiency of these methods is hindered by their dependence on pair-wise feature generation, which can be impractical for large amount of data. In this work, we attempt to employ and refine the GPT-3 embeddings for the duplicate detection task. We assume that the GPT-3 embeddings can accurately represent the semantics of the posts. In addition, by training a Siamese-based network based on the GPT-3 embeddings, we obtain a latent embedding that accurately captures the duplicate relation in technical forum posts. Our experiment on a benchmark dataset confirms the effectiveness of our approach and demonstrates superior performance compared to baseline methods. When applied to the dataset we constructed with a recent Stack Overflow dump, our approach attains a Top-1, Top-5, and Top-30 accuracy of 23.1%, 43.9%, and 68.9%, respectively. With a manual study, we confirm our approach's potential of finding unlabelled duplicates on technical forums.

Md Saidur Rahman, Foutse Khomh, Alaleh Hamidi et al.

Nowadays, intelligent systems and services are getting increasingly popular as they provide data-driven solutions to diverse real-world problems, thanks to recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). However, machine learning meets software engineering not only with promising potentials but also with some inherent challenges. Despite some recent research efforts, we still do not have a clear understanding of the challenges of developing ML-based applications and the current industry practices. Moreover, it is unclear where software engineering researchers should focus their efforts to better support ML application developers. In this paper, we report about a survey that aimed to understand the challenges and best practices of ML application development. We synthesize the results obtained from 80 practitioners (with diverse skills, experience, and application domains) into 17 findings; outlining challenges and best practices for ML application development. Practitioners involved in the development of ML-based software systems can leverage the summarized best practices to improve the quality of their system. We hope that the reported challenges will inform the research community about topics that need to be investigated to improve the engineering process and the quality of ML-based applications.

Yasuhiro Watanabe, Hironori Washizaki, Kazunori Sakamoto et al.

Previous machine learning (ML) system development research suggests that emerging software quality attributes are a concern due to the probabilistic behavior of ML systems. Assuming that detailed development processes depend on individual developers and are not discussed in detail. To help developers to standardize their ML system development processes, we conduct a preliminary systematic literature review on ML system development processes. A search query of 2358 papers identified 7 papers as well as two other papers determined in an ad-hoc review. Our findings include emphasized phases in ML system developments, frequently described practices and tailored traditional software development practices.

Hironori Washizaki, Hiromu Uchida, Foutse Khomh et al.

Machine-learning (ML) techniques have become popular in the recent years. ML techniques rely on mathematics and on software engineering. Researchers and practitioners studying best practices for designing ML application systems and software to address the software complexity and quality of ML techniques. Such design practices are often formalized as architecture patterns and design patterns by encapsulating reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems within given contexts. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no work collecting, classifying, and discussing these software-engineering (SE) design patterns for ML techniques systematically. Thus, we set out to collect good/bad SE design patterns for ML techniques to provide developers with a comprehensive and ordered classification of such patterns. We report here preliminary results of a systematic-literature review (SLR) of good/bad design patterns for ML.

Hironori Washizaki, Nobukazu Yoshioka, Atsuo Hazeyama et al.

Patterns are encapsulations of problems and solutions under specific contexts. As the industry is realizing many successes (and failures) in IoT systems development and operations, many IoT patterns have been published such as IoT design patterns and IoT architecture patterns. Because these patterns are not well classified, their adoption does not live up to their potential. To understand the reasons, this paper analyzes an extensive set of published IoT architecture and design patterns according to several dimensions and outlines directions for improvements in publishing and adopting IoT patterns.