Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto

Cauã Ferreira Barros, Bruna Borges Azevedo, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto et al.

The exponential growth of text-based data in domains such as healthcare, education, and social sciences has outpaced the capacity of traditional qualitative analysis methods, which are time-intensive and prone to subjectivity. Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by advanced generative AI, have emerged as transformative tools capable of automating and enhancing qualitative analysis. This study systematically maps the literature on the use of LLMs for qualitative research, exploring their application contexts, configurations, methodologies, and evaluation metrics. Findings reveal that LLMs are utilized across diverse fields, demonstrating the potential to automate processes traditionally requiring extensive human input. However, challenges such as reliance on prompt engineering, occasional inaccuracies, and contextual limitations remain significant barriers. This research highlights opportunities for integrating LLMs with human expertise, improving model robustness, and refining evaluation methodologies. By synthesizing trends and identifying research gaps, this study aims to guide future innovations in the application of LLMs for qualitative analysis.

Breno Cruvinel Marinho, Renato Bulcão-Neto, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto

Software architectures play a critical role in software quality assurance. However, small and medium companies (SMC) often suffer from the absence of professionals with skills and expertise in software architecture. That situation potentially affects the final quality of the software products and pressures projects budget with extra costs with consulting. This paper presents a recommender system of architectural design decisions called Archify. The goal is to support SMC companies in part of the effort of architecturally designing their products. Archify implements a wizard-styled interface that guides the developer or project manager through a set of specific questions. While the user answers these questions, Archify buffers a set of corresponding architectural decision recommendations. As the final result, the system recommends a set of architectural decisions matching the project's needs according to the requirements (as provided by the user) of the software under development. Nineteen professionals from academia and industry evaluated Archify through two surveys. The findings reveal that 94.7% of the participants approved Archify as a supporting tool. Respondents also highlighted the lack of tools supporting software architecture design, remarking the relevance of the proposed system.

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.

Ahmad Mohsin, Naeem Khalid Janjua, Syed MS Islam et al.

Systems-of-Systems (SoS) result from the collaboration of independent Constituent Systems (CSs) to achieve particular missions. CSs are not totally known at design time, and may also leave or join SoS at runtime, which turns the SoS architecture to be inherently dynamic, forming new architectural configurations and impacting the overall system quality attributes (i.e. performance, security and reliability). Therefore, it is vital to model and evaluate the impact of these stochastic architectural changes on SoS properties at abstract level at the early stage in order to analyze and select appropriate architectural design. Architectural description languages (ADL) have been proposed and used to deal with SoS dynamic architectures. However, we still envision gaps to be bridged and challenges to be addressed in the forthcoming years. This paper presents a broad discussion on the state-of-the-art notations to model and analyze SoS dynamic architectures. The main contribution this paper is threefold: (i) providing results of a literature review on the support of available architecture modeling approaches for SoS and an analysis of their semantic extension to support specification of SoS dynamic architectures, and (ii) a corresponding taxonomy for modeling SoS obtained as a result of the literature review. Besides, we also discuss future directions and challenges to be overcome in the forthcoming years.

Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto, Luiz Fernando Batista Loja

Software engineering is a young discipline. Despite efforts in recent years, some elements still require further development, research, and systematization. One of these elements are methods. They consist of a set of well-defined activities used in a software development to guide how the work should be performed to achieve the expected results. However, there is a lack of systematic knowledge that effectively guide how work should be done in a variety of areas. Despite the knowledge available in Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), only the classical methods are comprised there, while emerging topics such as Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD), and Model-Based Software Development (MBSE) are only briefly mentioned. We claim that it is also necessary to investigate methods for those emerging software engineering subtracks. In this direction, this paper presents a a speculative and preliminary emerging results on the establishment of methods for MBSE. We report some insights on the conception of methods for MBSE.