José L. Barros‐Justo

Sergio Zapata, José Luis Barros-Justo, Gerardo Maturro et al.

The purpose of this protocol is to be useful to identify, evaluate and synthesize reported knowledge about the measurement of interpersonal trust (IpT) in virtual software teams. To achieve this goal we applied a research technique known as Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The aim of a SLR is to be as objective, analytical, and repeatable as possible.

José L. Barros-Justo, Fabiane B. V. Benitti, Saurabh Tiwari

Objective: To identify and classify the positive and negative impacts of using Use Cases in real-world settings. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study. The search strategies retrieved a set of 4,431 papers out of which 47 were selected as primary studies. We defined four facets to classify these studies: 1) the positive impact (advantages), 2) the negative impact (disadvantages), 3) the industry's domain and 4) the type of research reported. Results: Our study identified eight categories of advantages related to the application of Use Cases. The most mentioned were estimation, analysis and automation. These advantages had a heterogeneous distribution along the years. On the other hand, the granularity of the scenarios described in the Use Cases, the lack of a standardized format for specifying requirements, and the lack of appropriate guidelines for analysing them were the most mentioned disadvantages. We identified a variety of industry domains, grouped into seven categories. As we can expect most of the papers report experiences in the Information Technology domain, followed by financials applications. Almost half the papers applied evaluation research, including an empirical validation. Only one third of the analysed papers reported threats to validity, the most mentioned being generalizability (38%). Conclusions: Use Cases have proven to be a useful tool in software development, particularly during the early stages. The positive effects far outweigh the few negative effects reported, although this may be due to the researchers' tendency of not reporting negative results.

José L. Barros-Justo, Luisa Rincón, Ángela Villota et al.

The value of a systematic secondary study (a systematic mapping study (SMS) or a systematic literature review (SLR)) comes, directly, from its systematic nature. The formal, well-defined, objective and unbiased process guarantees that the results from these systematically conducted studies are valid. This process is embodied in an action protocol, which must be agreed upon by all the researchers before conducting the secondary study. The protocol is, therefore, a detailed action plan, which contains all the tasks and the ordered sequence of steps to be executed. This document details that protocol for a SLR on the adoption of the software product line engineering (SPLE) approach in industrial development contexts. The goal of that SLR is to identify and analyse the benefits and drawbacks that this adoption has had in industrial development contexts, in contrast to the experiences reported in academic environments.

José L. Barros-Justo, Samuel Sepúlveda, Nelson Martínez-Araujo et al.

Context: The Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) paradigm and the planning phase of a systematic literature review. Objective: A protocol to do a systematic literature review with detailed information about the processes suggested by several guidelines in the field of evidence-based software engineering. Method: An analisys of recent systematic literature reviews published in world leading journals, plus the use of two renowned guidelines and a textbook to sinthetise a formal plan (the protocol). Results: The validated protocol Conclusions: We found that most of the published systematic reviews lack on reporting the protocol, or it is weak. There is a lack of tool support to develop formal protocols. Although a protocol, like a plan, must have the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations, its objective is that the actual activities should resemble as far as possible of those already planned. Therefore, it is a difficult balance to achieve and, researchers must be careful not to introduce alterations that could become threats to the validity of the entire work.

Fernando Pinciroli, Jose Luis Barros Justo, Laura Zeligueta et al.

The amount of aspect-oriented software development techniques and tools have been increasing for the last years but still they have not enough maturity and are not sufficiently spread to be included in a project leader's box of tools. Software development projects have to deal with many risks, and the main function of project leaders is to minimize them. The use of immature technologies, tools newcomers to the market, techniques that have not been tested enough, etc., would be very risky decisions to take by who has the responsibility to carry out a successful software development project. On the other hand, the availability of well-known tools and techniques and the adherence to standards and best practices will help professionals to make good estimates and to take better decisions. There is many proposals on aspect-oriented techniques, notations, tools, etc., but they have not yet unified on a common body of knowledge and none of them has become the most popular approach. We are interested in the early phases of the aspect-oriented SDLC which include the phases from the beginning of the life cycle until architecture design. We are interested in portraying the state of the art of aspect-oriented techniques and tools, in the identification of the standards they employ. Our goal is to collect all the available evidence, analyze it, and study the possibility of applying these techniques, tools and standards in real projects, taking advantage of the benefits of the aspect-oriented paradigm, by identifying the standard and widespread approaches, techniques, notations and tools present in the scientific literature and to verify if they were applied in the industry, by means of a systematic mapping of the literature published between 1995 and 2019.

José L. Barros-Justo, Ania L. Cravero-Leal, Fabiane B. V. Benitti et al.

This document details the planning phase of a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). Our goal is to identify the software patterns used during the RE phase, in real-world setting (i.e., in real projects), not in academia (toy projects) and, to understand the impact of their application, in terms of different characteristics, pertaining to the development process as well as the final product. Through a review of the literature published until January 2017, we will investigate what the research community has reported on the application of patterns in the industrial context, the data supporting these claims, the specific patterns employed, the RE activities, the results (positive or negative) and the metrics used to validate these results.

Jose Luis Barros-Justo, Fernando Pinciroli, Santiago Matalonga et al.

This document details the planning phase of a Systematic Mapping Study. Our goal is to identify and to understand the benefits that the software engineering community has reported on the application of the different reuse strategies in industrial context, by building a general picture (map) containing: the claimed benefits, the data supporting those claims, the industry's domains and the reuse strategy employed.