Marianne Huchard

Thomas Georges, Marianne Huchard, Mélanie König et al.

Migrating a set of software variants into a software product line (SPL) is an expensive and potentially challenging endeavor. Indeed, SPL engineering can significantly impact a company's development process and often requires changes to established developer practices. The work presented in this paper stems from a collaboration with a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that decided to migrate its existing code base into an SPL. In this study, we conducted an in-depth evaluation of the company's current development processes and practices, as well as the anticipated benefits and risks associated with the migration. Key stakeholders involved in software development participated in this evaluation to provide insight into their perceptions of the migration and their potential resistance to change. This paper describes the design of the interviews conducted with these stakeholders and presents an analysis of the results. Among the qualitative findings, we observed that all participants, regardless of their role in the development process, identified benefits of the migration relevant to their own activities. Furthermore, our results suggest that an effective risk mitigation strategy involves keeping stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the process, preserving as many good practices as possible, and actively involving them in the migration to ensure a smooth transition and minimize potential challenges.

Alexandre Bazin, Alain Gutierrez, Marianne Huchard et al.

A widely used Agile practice for requirements is to produce a set of user stories (also called ``agile product backlog''), which roughly includes a list of pairs (role, feature), where the role handles the feature for a certain purpose. In the context of Software Product Lines, the requirements for a family of similar systems is thus a family of user-story sets, one per system, leading to a 3-dimensional dataset composed of sets of triples (system, role, feature). In this paper, we combine Triadic Concept Analysis (TCA) and Large Language Model (LLM) prompting to suggest the user-story set required to develop a new system relying on the variability logic of an existing system family. This process consists in 1) computing 3-dimensional variability expressed as a set of TCA implications, 2) providing the designer with intelligible design options, 3) capturing the designer's selection of options, 4) proposing a first user-story set corresponding to this selection, 5) consolidating its validity according to the implications identified in step 1, while completing it if necessary, and 6) leveraging LLM to have a more comprehensive website. This process is evaluated with a dataset comprising the user-story sets of 67 similar-purpose websites.

Alexandre Bazin, Jessie Carbonnel, Marianne Huchard et al.

Formal Concept Analysis and its associated conceptual structures have been used to support exploratory search through conceptual navigation. Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) is an extension of Formal Concept Analysis to process relational datasets. RCA and its multiple interconnected structures represent good candidates to support exploratory search in relational datasets, as they are enabling navigation within a structure as well as between the connected structures. However, building the entire structures does not present an efficient solution to explore a small localised area of the dataset, for instance to retrieve the closest alternatives to a given query. In these cases, generating only a concept and its neighbour concepts at each navigation step appears as a less costly alternative. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to compute a concept and its neighbourhood in extended concept lattices. The concepts are generated directly from the relational context family, and possess both formal and relational attributes. The algorithm takes into account two RCA scaling operators. We illustrate it on an example.

Lei Zhang, Huaxi, Zhang et al.

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke Cloud technologies such as Cloud computing, Cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. In a few short years, Cloud robotics as a newly emerged field has already received much research and industrial attention. The use of the Cloud for robotics and automation brings some potential benefits largely ameliorating the performance of robotic systems. However, there are also some challenges. First of all, from the viewpoint of architecture, how to model and describe the architectures of Cloud robotic systems? How to manage the variability of Cloud robotic systems? How to maximize the reuse of their architectures? In this paper, we present an architecture approach to easily design and understand Cloud robotic systems and manage their variability.