Damian Tamburri

Ambarish Moharil, Damian Tamburri, Indika Kumara et al.

This paper introduces a scale-invariant methodology employing \textit{Fractal Geometry} to analyze and explain the nonlinear dynamics of complex connectionist systems. By leveraging architectural self-similarity in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), we quantify fractal dimensions and \textit{roughness} to deeply understand their dynamics and enhance the quality of \textit{intrinsic} explanations. Our approach integrates principles from Chaos Theory to improve visualizations of fractal evolution and utilizes a Graph-Based Neural Network for reconstructing network topology. This strategy aims at advancing the \textit{intrinsic} explainability of connectionist Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.

Stefano Dalla Palma, Dario Di Nucci, Damian Tamburri

Data originating from open-source software projects provide valuable information to enhance software quality. In the scope of Software Defect Prediction, one of the most challenging parts is extracting valid data about failure-prone software components from these repositories, which can help develop more robust software. In particular, collecting data, calculating metrics, and synthesizing results from these repositories is a tedious and error-prone task, which often requires understanding the programming languages involved in the mined repositories, eventually leading to a proliferation of language-specific data-mining software. This paper presents RepoMiner, a language-agnostic tool developed to support software engineering researchers in creating datasets to support any study on defect prediction. RepoMiner automatically collects failure data from software components, labels them as failure-prone or neutral, and calculates metrics to be used as ground truth for defect prediction models. We present its implementation and provide examples of its application.

Paul Ralph, Nauman bin Ali, Sebastian Baltes et al.

Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.

Indika Kumara, Giovanni Quattrocchi, Damian Tamburri et al.

A key focus of the SODALITE project is to assure the quality and performance of the deployments of applications over heterogeneous Cloud and HPC environments. It offers a set of tools to detect and correct errors, smells, and bugs in the deployment models and their provisioning workflows, and a framework to monitor and refactor deployment model instances at runtime. This paper presents objectives, designs, early results of the quality assurance framework and the refactoring framework.

Indika Kumara, Jun Han, Alan Colman et al.

In a multi-tenant service network, multiple virtual service networks (VSNs), one for each tenant, coexist on the same service network. The tenants themselves need to be able to dynamically create and customize their own VSNs to support their initial and changing functional and performance requirements. These tasks are problematic for them due to: 1) platform-specific knowledge required, 2) the existence of a large number of customization options and their dependencies, and 3) the complexity in deriving the right subset of options. In this paper, we present an approach to enable and simplify the tenant-driven customization of multi-tenant service networks. We propose to use feature as a high-level customization abstraction. A regulated collaboration among a set of services in the service network realizes a feature. A software engineer can design a customization policy for a service network using the mappings between features and collaborations, and enact the policy with the controller of the service network. A tenant can then specify the requirements for its VSN as a set of functional and performance features. A customization request from a tenant triggers the customization policy of the service network, which (re)configures the corresponding VSN at runtime to realize the selected features. We show the feasibility of our approach with two case studies and a performance evaluation.