Eduardo Guerra

Anh Nguyen-Duc, Dron Khanna, Des Greer et al.

[Context] The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disruptive impact on how people work and collaborate across all global economic sectors, including the software business. While remote working is not new for software engineers, forced Work-from-home situations to come with both constraints, limitations, and opportunities for individuals, software teams and software companies. As the "new normal" for working might be based on the current state of Work From Home (WFH), it is useful to understand what has happened and learn from that. [Objective] The goal of this study is to gain insights on how their WFH environment impacts software projects and software companies. We are also interested in understanding if the impact differs between software startups and established companies. [Method] We conducted a global-scale, cross-sectional survey during spring and summer 2021. Our results are based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of 297 valid responses. [Results] We observed a mixed perception of the impact of WFH on software project management, resilience, and innovation. Certain patterns on WFH, control and coordination mechanisms and collaborative tools are observed globally. We find that team, agility and leadership are the three most important factors for achieving resilience during the pandemic. Although startups do not perceive the impact of WFH differently, there is a difference between engineers who work in a small team context and those who work in a large team context. [Conclusion] The result suggests a contingency approach in studying and improving WFH practices and environment in the future software industry.

Duarte Oliveira, João Fidalgo, Joelma Choma et al.

Software analytics is a data-driven approach to decision making, which allows software practitioners to leverage valuable insights from data about software to achieve higher development process productivity and improve different aspects of software quality. In previous work, a set of patterns for adopting a lean software analytics process was identified through a literature review. This paper presents two patterns to add to the original set, forming a pattern language for adopting software analytics practices that aims to inform decision-making activities of software practitioners. The writing of these two patterns was informed by the solutions employed in the context of two case studies on software analytics practices, and the patterns were further validated by searching for their occurrence in the literature. The pattern Broad-Spectrum Diagnostic proposes to conduct more broad analysis based on common metrics when the team does not have the expertise to understand the kind of problems that software analytics can help to solve; and the pattern Embedded Improvements suggests adding improvement tasks as part of other routine activities.

Phyllipe Lima, Jorge Melegati, Everaldo Gomes et al.

Code annotations is a widely used feature in Java systems to configure custom metadata on programming elements. Their increasing presence creates the need for approaches to assess and comprehend their usage and distribution. In this context, software visualization has been studied and researched to improve program comprehension in different aspects. This study aimed at designing a software visualization approach that graphically displays how code annotations are distributed and organized in a software system and developing a tool, as a reference implementation of the approach, to generate views and interact with users. We conducted an empirical evaluation through questionnaires and interviews to evaluate our visualization approach considering four aspects: effectiveness for program comprehension, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and suitability for the intended audience. The resulting data was used to perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis. The tool identifies package responsibilities providing visual information about their annotations at different levels. Using the developed tool, the participants achieved a high correctness rate in the program comprehension tasks and performed very well in questions about the overview of the system under analysis. Finally, participants perceived that the tool outperforms existing approaches for code inspection when searching for information related to code annotations. The results show that the visualization approach using the developed tool is effective in program comprehension tasks related to code annotations, which can also be used to identify responsibilities in the application packages. Moreover, it was evaluated as suitable for newcomers to overview the usage of annotations in the system and for architects to perform a deep analysis that can potentially detect misplaced annotations and abnormal growths on their usage.