186,395 research outputs found

    On Integrating Student Empirical Software Engineering Studies with Research and Teaching Goals

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    Background: Many empirical software engineering studies use students as subjects and are conducted as part of university courses. Aim: We aim at reporting our experiences with using guidelines for integrating empirical studies with our research and teaching goals. Method: We document our experience from conducting three studies with graduate students in two software architecture courses. Results: Our results show some problems that we faced when following the guidelines and deviations we made from the original guidelines. Conclusions: Based on our results we propose recommendations for empirical software engineering studies that are integrated in university courses.

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Modeling Architectural Patterns Using Architectural Primitives

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    Architectural patterns are a key point in architectural documentation. Regrettably, there is poor support for modeling architectural patterns, because the pattern elements are not directly matched by elements in modeling languages, and, at the same time, patterns support an inherent variability that is hard to model using a single modeling solution. This paper proposes tackling this problem by finding and representing architectural primitives, as the participants in the solutions that patterns convey. In particular, we examine a number of architectural patterns to discover those primitive abstractions that are common among the patterns, and at the same time demonstrate a degree of variability in each pattern. These abstractions belong in the components and connectors architectural view, though more abstractions can be found in other views. We have selected UML 2 as the language for representing these primitive abstractions as extensions of the standard UML elements. The added value of this approach is twofold: it proposes a generic and extensible approach for modeling architectural patterns by means of architectural primitives; it demonstrates an initial set of primitives that participate in several well-known architectural patterns.
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