Elisa Yumi Nakagawa

Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto, Bruno Gabriel Araújo Lebtag, Paulo Gabriel Teixeira et al.

System-of-Systems (SoS) has consolidated itself as a special type of software-intensive systems. As such, subtypes of SoS have also emerged, such as Cyber-Physical SoS (CPSoS) that are formed essentially of cyber-physical constituent systems and Systems-of-Information Systems (SoIS) that contain information systems as their constituents. In contrast to CPSoS that have been investigated and covered in the specialized literature, SoIS still lack critical discussion about their fundamentals. The main contribution of this paper is to present those fundamentals to set an understanding of SoIS. By offering a discussion and examining literature cases, we draw an essential settlement on SoIS definition, basics, and practical implications. The discussion herein presented results from research conducted on SoIS over the past years in interinstitutional and multinational research collaborations. The knowledge gathered in this paper arises from several scientific discussion meetings among the authors. As a result, we aim to contribute to the state of the art of SoIS besides paving the research avenues for the forthcoming years.

Katia Romero Felizardo, Elisa Yumi Nakagawa, Stephen G. MacDonell et al.

Context: In order to preserve the value of Systematic Reviews (SRs), they should be frequently updated considering new evidence that has been produced since the completion of the previous version of the reviews. However, the update of an SR is a time consuming, manual task. Thus, many SRs have not been updated as they should be and, therefore, they are currently outdated. Objective: The main contribution of this paper is to support the update of SRs. Method: We propose USR-VTM, an approach based on Visual Text Mining (VTM) techniques, to support selection of new evidence in the form of primary studies. We then present a tool, named Revis, which supports our approach. Finally, we evaluate our approach through a comparison of outcomes achieved using USR-VTM versus the traditional (manual) approach. Results: Our results show that USR-VTM increases the number of studies correctly included compared to the traditional approach. Conclusions: USR-VTM effectively supports the update of SRs.

Cristiane Aparecida Lana, Milena Guessi, Pablo Oliveira Antonino et al.

Software-intensive Systems-of-Systems (SoS) refer to an arrangement of managerially and operationally independent systems(i.e., constituent systems), which work collaboratively towards the achievement of global missions. Because some SoS are developed for critical domains, such as healthcare and transportation, there is an increasing need to attain higher quality levels, which often justifies additional costs that can be incurred by adopting formal and semi-formal approaches (i.e., languages and techniques) for modeling requirements. Various approaches have been employed, but a detailed landscape is still missing, and it is not well known whether they are appropriate for addressing the inherent characteristics of SoS. The main contribution of this article is to present this landscape by reporting on the state of the art in SoS requirements modeling. This landscape was built by means of a systematic mapping and shows formal and semi-formal approaches grouped from model-based to property-oriented ones. Most of them have been tested in safety-critical domains, where formal approaches such as finite state machines are aimed at critical system parts, while semi-formal approaches (e.g., UML and i*) address non-critical parts. Although formal and semi-formal modeling is an essential activity, the quality of SoS requirements does not rely solely on which formalism is used, but also on the availability of supporting tools/mechanisms that enable, for instance, requirements verification along the SoS lifecycle

Bianca Minetto Napoleao, Katia Romero Felizardo, Erica Ferreira de Souza et al.

Context: A tertiary study can be performed to identify related reviews on a topic of interest. However, the elaboration of an appropriate and effective search string to detect secondary studies is challenging for Software Engineering (SE) researchers. Objective: The main goal of this study is to propose a suitable search string to detect secondary studies in SE, addressing issues such as the quantity of applied terms, relevance, recall and precision. Method: We analyzed seven tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure -- strings' terms to detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching -- titles alone or abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We validate our string by performing a two-step validation process. Firstly, we evaluated the capability to retrieve secondary studies over a set of 1537 secondary studies included in 24 tertiary studies in SE. Secondly, we evaluated the general capacity of retrieving secondary studies over an automated search using the Scopus digital library. Results: Our string was capable to retrieve an optimum value of over 90\% of the included secondary studies (recall) with a high general precision of almost 60\%. Conclusion: The suitable search string for finding secondary studies in SE contains the terms "systematic review", "literature review", "systematic mapping", "mapping study" and "systematic map".