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Today's software industry is global, virtual, and depending more than ever on strong and reliable processes. Stakeholders and infrastructure are distributed across the globe, posing challenges that go beyond those with co‐located teams and servers. Software Engineering continues to be a complex undertaking, with projects challenged to meet expectations, especially regarding costs. We know that Software Engineering is an ever‐changing discipline, with the result that firms and their employees must regularly embrace new methods, tools, technologies, and processes. In 2020, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) and the International Conference on Systems and Software Processes (ICSSP) joined forces aiming to create a holistic understanding of the software landscape both from the perspective of human and infrastructure distribution and also the processes to support software development. Unfortunately, these challenges have become even more personal to many more in 2020 due to the disruption introduced by the COVID‐19 pandemic, which forced both conferences to be held virtually. As an outcome of the joint event, we selected a set of the best papers from the two conferences, which were invited to submit extended versions to this Special Issue in the Journal of Software: Maintenance and Evolution. Dedicated committees were established to identify the best papers. Eight papers were invited and ultimately, seven of these invited papers have made it into this Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • An active learning-based tool supporting researchers finding relevant paper faster. • Use of domain knowledge to faster find the first relevant paper deterministically. • An accurate estimator for the total number of relevant papers. • With the estimator, the system can stop at target recall with little overhead. • An error correction strategy efficiently resolves human errors. Abstract Literature reviews are essential for any researcher trying to keep up to date with the burgeoning software engineering literature. Finding relevant papers can be hard due to the huge amount of candidates provided by search. FAST2 is a novel tool for assisting the researchers to find the next promising paper to read. This paper describes FAST2 and tests it on four large systematic literature review datasets. We show that FAST2 robustly optimizes the human effort to find most (95%) of the relevant software engineering papers while also compensating for the errors made by humans during the review process. The effectiveness of FAST2 can be attributed to three key innovations: (1) a novel way of applying external domain knowledge (a simple two or three keyword search) to guide the initial selection of papers—which helps to find relevant research papers faster with less variances; (2) an estimator of the number of remaining relevant papers yet to be found—which helps the reviewer decide when to stop the review; (3) a novel human error correction algorithm—which corrects a majority of human misclassifications (labeling relevant papers as non-relevant or vice versa) without imposing too much extra human effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowdsource software development has become more and more popular in recent years in the software industry. Crowdsourcing is an open‐call technique for outsourcing tasks to a broad and undefined crowd. Crowdsourcing provides numerous advantages including reduced costs, fast project completion, talent identification, diversity of solutions, top‐quality, and access to problem‐solving creativity. Despite of the benefits gained from crowdsourcing, there are numerous issues like lack of experienced workers, lack of confidentiality, copyright issues, software sustainability, and so forth. There is also less focus on the long‐term sustainability of software development because of new ideas emerging in crowdsourcing software development. Furthermore, in literature, lack of guidelines towards sustainable software crowdsourcing is highlighted as one of the limitations in the software standards. This study aims to identify the factors that influence sustainability aspects in crowdsourced software development. We have conducted a systematic literature review for identification of these factors. In this paper, we present findings of the systematic literature review in the form of a list of 11 factors extracted from a sample of 45 finally selected papers. Among these factors, six of the factors are ranked as critical factors. These critical factors are "Lack of coding standard in documentation," "Use of popular programming tools," "Crowd Lack of knowledge and awareness about sustainability," "Energy‐efficient coding," "Lack of awareness about sustainable software engineering practices," and "Lack of coordination/communication between client and crowd." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to analyze the current perspective as regards knowledge related to what causes stress or motivates developers, how these two aspects are related to each other, and how this in turn affects their performance in the sphere of Global Software Development and how these can be controlled. This paper presents the results obtained after conducting a systematic mapping study of literature in order to analyze how stress, motivation, and performance affect the project members in Global Software Development teams. We carried out a systematic mapping of published studies dealing with stress, motivation, and performance in global software engineering. A total of 118 papers dealing with this subject were found. The literature analyzed provided a relatively significant quantity of data referring to the impact that the characteristics of distributed software development projects have on the performance and productivity of teams, along with the actions taken to improve that performance. However, when focusing on the analysis of the impact of this type of projects on team members' motivation, and on the actions that can be taken to improve that motivation, we discovered that the number of works decreases considerably and that works referring to the impact of this kind of development on developers' stress were virtually non‐existent, as were those concerning ways in which to improve that stress. We are, therefore, of the opinion that it is necessary to carry out in‐depth research into the aspects of working in distributed teams that may have a negative impact on developers' levels of motivation and stress, along with what could be beneficial in order to improve levels of motivation and decrease levels of stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As code is now an inextricable part of science it should be supported by competent Software Engineering, analogously to statistical claims being properly supported by competent statistics. If and when code avoids adequate scrutiny, science becomes unreliable and unverifiable because results — text, data, graphs, images, etc — depend on untrustworthy code. Currently, scientists rarely assure the quality of the code they rely on, and rarely make it accessible for scrutiny. Even when available, scientists rarely provide adequate documentation to understand or use it reliably. This paper proposes and justifies ways to improve science using code: 1.   Professional Software Engineers can help, particularly in critical fields such as public health, climate change and energy. 2.   'Software Engineering Boards,' analogous to Ethics or Institutional Review Boards, should be instigated and used. 3.   The Reproducible Analytic Pipeline (RAP) methodology can be generalized to cover code and Software Engineering methodologies,        in a generalization this paper introduces called RAP +. RAP + (or comparable interventions) could be supported and or even required       in journal, conference and funding body policies. The paper's Supplemental Material provides a summary of Software Engineering best practice relevant to scientific research, including further suggestions for RAP + workflows. 'Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer.' Donald E. Knuth in |$A=B$| [ 1 ] 'I have to write to discover what I am doing.' Flannery O'Connor, quoted in Write for your life [ 2 ] 'Criticism is the mother of methodology.' Robert P. Abelson in Statistics as Principled Argument [ 3 ] 'From its earliest times, science has operated by being open and transparent about methods and evidence, regardless of which technology has been in vogue.' Editorial in Nature [ 4 ] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing blockchain approaches exhibit a diverse set of dimensions, and on the other hand, IoT-based health care applications manifest a wide variety of requirements. The state-of-the-art analysis of blockchain concerning existing IoT-based approaches for the healthcare domain has been investigated to a limited extend. The purpose of this survey paper is to analyze current state-of-the-art blockchain work in several IoT disciplines, with a focus on the health sector. This study also attempts to demonstrate the prospective use of blockchain in healthcare, as well as the obstacles and future paths of blockchain development. Furthermore, the fundamentals of blockchain have been thoroughly explained to appeal to a diverse audience. On the contrary, we analyzed state-of-the-art studies from several IoT disciplines for eHealth, and also the study deficit but also the obstacles when considering blockchain to IoT, which are highlighted and explored in the paper with suggested alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a summary of the current state of the Software & Systems Modeling (SoSyM) journal in 2023. It highlights the publication of new papers and the addition of new editors to the journal. The retirement of two esteemed editors is also mentioned, with gratitude expressed for their contributions. The article includes statistics on the number of papers published, the impact factor of the journal, and the number of submissions and downloads. It announces the recipients of the journal's ten-year most influential paper awards and lists the papers presented at the MODELS conference. The article concludes by expressing appreciation to the reviewers for their contributions. Additionally, a separate document is a message of gratitude and recognition from the software and systems modeling community. The community expresses their appreciation to all the reviewers who have assisted the modeling community and announces the recipients of the Best Reviewers of 2023 award. The document also provides a list of all the reviewers who contributed their expertise to the journal over the past year. The content of the current issue is briefly mentioned, and the community wishes everyone a joyful New Year and encourages readers to explore the journal's archive. [Extracted from the article]

Models are the key tools humans use to manage complexity in description, development, and analysis. This applies to all scientific and engineering disciplines and in particular to the development of software and data-intensive systems. However, different methods and terminologies have become established in the individual disciplines, even in the sub-fields of Informatics, which raises the need for a comprehensive and cross-sectional analysis of the past, present, and future of modeling research. This paper aims to shed some light on how different modeling disciplines emerged and what characterizes them with a discussion of the potential toward a common modeling future. It focuses on the areas of software, data, and process modeling and reports on an analysis of the research approaches, goals, and visions pursued in each, as well as the methods used. This analysis is based on the results of a survey conducted in the communities concerned, on a bibliometric study, and on interviews with a prominent representative of each of these communities. The paper discusses the different viewpoints of the communities, their commonalities and differences, and identifies possible starting points for further collaboration. It further discusses current challenges for the communities in general and modeling as a research topic in particular and highlights visions for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated software transformations and the process of automated program repair and improvement are an important aspect of modern software engineering practices. In this paper, we describe a system which uses a graph-based deep learning model that can be trained to automatically transform and improve computer programs. By operating on language-agnostic, universal graph-like structures easily extractable from source code files (abstract syntax trees), the deep learning agent learns which transformations should be effectively applied to various structures recognized in the source code in order to improve it. By defining a metric which we want to improve and introducing an optimization task—a reinforcement learning setting, an agent learns to automatically apply a chain of transformations to the program, drastically improving it. While similar program improvement processes exist, they exclusively use exhaustive search algorithms to try all the possible code transformations which is a long process susceptible to local optimum issues. Our solution aims to model and embed structural knowledge about the programs being transformed which greatly helps the agent to choose best possible code transformations to apply. Elements of the approach we present in this paper are further applicable not just to automatic software improvement tasks, but also to other code-related tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software quality is becoming a momentous challenge in software engineering processes, and software testing has a pivotal role in its measurements. Nature-inspired metaheuristic methods play an essential role in software testing, in which various studies have been conducted in this field; however, due to a lack of wide-ranging papers reviewing these methods, conducting a comprehensive systematic review to examine an array of crucial mechanisms in this field has become a necessity. This study aims to present a detailed analysis and taxonomically classifies the metaheuristic methods inspired by nature. This paper compromises a systematic literature review of 65 chosen studies published between 2015 and 2022. Genetic algorithm-based, hybrid, ant colony optimization-based, cuckoo search-based, firefly algorithm-based, artificial bee colony-based, and other metaheuristic methods constitute this systematic study's stratification. Evaluation methods, applied tools, merits, and demerits of each reviewed article are investigated. Additionally, future directions and open issues are addressed. This conducted paper not only expounds on software testing strengths, open issues, and future works, but also recognizes the quest for optimizing the insufficient metrics in software testing, such as mutation score, complexity, and scalability, which would be the propulsion of the testing process if consummated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational dependency on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) drives the preparedness challenge to cope with business process disruptions. Business Continuity Management (BCM) encompasses effective planning to enable business functions to resume to an acceptable state of operation within a defined timeframe. This paper presents a systematic literature review that communicates the strategic guidelines to streamline the organizational processes in the BCM program, culminating in the Business Continuity Plan design, according to the organization's maturity. The systematic literature review methodology follows the Evidence-Based Software Engineering protocol assisted by the Parsifal tool, using the EbscoHost, ScienceDirect, and Scopus databases, ranging from 2000 to February 2021. International Standards and Frameworks guide the BCM program implementation, however, there is a gap in communicating metrics and what needs to be measured in the BCM program. The major paper result is the confirmation of the identified gap, through the analysis of the studies that, according to the BCM components, report strategic guidelines to streamline the BCM program. The analysis quantifies and discusses the contribution of the studies on each BCM component to design a framework supported by metrics, that allows assessing the organization's preparedness in each BCM component, focusing on Information Systems and ICT strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed to discover how selected English language authors employ specific rhetorical, grammatical, and stylistic elements in presenting new knowledge to the target audience and how they communicate science to the community of academicians in order to convey scientific information to various audiences. To this end, the generic structures, as well as lexico-grammaticality systems inbuilt in introduction sections of English academic research papers of three different disciplines, linguistics, chemistry and software engineering, were explored. To collect the data, a corpus consisting of 90 papers, 30 for each discipline, published between 2014 and 2016 in Elsevier journals was selected randomly. For genre analysis, Hasan’s model of generic structure potential was used, while Halliday’s model was used for the analysis of lexico-grammaticality systems. The results showed that ‘Previous study’ and ‘Purpose of study’ were the obligatory elements among the 11 types of generic structures. Furthermore, material process, declarative mood, the use of conjunctions in textual theme and circumstantial adjunct were mostly used, while no interpersonal theme was found in the obligatory elements. The findings promise pedagogical implications for novice writers and university students of English language generally, and second language or foreign language writers from different cultures in different fields of study, in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a guest editorial for the special section on SEFM 2020 and 2021 in the journal Software & Systems Modeling. The International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM) aims to bring together practitioners and researchers to advance the state of the art in formal methods and their application in the software industry. This special section includes selected papers from SEFM 2020 and 2021, which were held virtually during the COVID pandemic. Each article in this section has undergone rigorous peer review and has been revised and extended compared to its conference version. The selected papers cover topics such as embedded software portability and verification, nontermination inference, quantitative modeling and analysis of BDI agents, lazy model checking for recursive state machines, P-stable abstractions of hybrid systems, fairness and guarantees for extended bounded response LTL+P synthesis, counterexample classification, analyzing the impact of human errors on interactive service robotic scenarios, and active model learning of stochastic reactive systems. [Extracted from the article]

The minimizing Delta Debugging (DDMIN) was among the first algorithms designed to automate the task of reducing test cases. Its popularity is based on the characteristics that it works on any kind of input, without knowledge about the input structure. Several studies proved that smaller outputs can be produced faster with more advanced techniques (e.g., building a tree representation of the input and reducing that data structure); however, if the structure is unknown or changing frequently, maintaining the descriptors might not be resource‐efficient. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on the evaluation of the novel fixed‐point iteration of minimizing Delta Debugging (DDMIN*) on publicly available test suites related to software engineering. Our experiments show that DDMIN* can help reduce inputs further by 48.08% on average compared to DDMIN (using lines as the units of the reduction). Although the effectiveness of the algorithm improved, it comes with the cost of additional testing steps. This study shows how the characteristics of the input affect the results and when it pays off using DDMIN*. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern systems are increasingly connected and more integrated with other existing systems, giving rise to systems‐of‐systems (SoS). An SoS consists of a set of independent, heterogeneous systems that interact to provide new functionalities and accomplish global missions through emergent behavior manifested at runtime. The distinctive characteristics of SoS, when contrasted to traditional systems, pose significant research challenges within software engineering. These challenges motivate the need for a paradigm shift and the exploration of novel approaches for designing, developing, deploying, and evolving these systems. The International Workshop on Software Engineering for Systems‐of‐Systems (SESoS) series started in 2013 to fill a gap in scientific forums addressing SoS from the software engineering perspective, becoming the first venue for this purpose. This article presents a study aimed at outlining the evolution and future trajectory of software engineering for SoS based on the examination of 57 papers spanning the 11 editions of the SESoS workshop (2013–2023). The study combined scoping review and scientometric analysis methods to categorize and analyze the research contributions concerning temporal and geographic distribution, topics of interest, research methodologies employed, application domains, and research impact. Based on such a comprehensive overview, this article discusses current and future directions in software engineering for SoS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development. Because qualitative methods are used to explore human behavior in‐depth, we believe that studies using such methods will become more common. Existing qualitative software engineering guidelines do not cover the full breadth of qualitative methods and the knowledge on how to use them like in social sciences. The purpose of this study was to extend the software engineering community's current body of knowledge regarding available qualitative methods and their quality assurance frameworks and to provide recommendations and guidelines for their use. With the support of an epistemological argument and a survey of the literature, we suggest that future research would benefit from (1) utilizing a broader set of research methods, (2) more strongly emphasizing reflexivity, and (3) employing qualitative guidelines and quality criteria. We present an overview of three qualitative methods commonly used in social sciences but rarely seen in software engineering research, namely interpretative phenomenological analysis, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. Furthermore, we discuss the meaning of reflexivity in relation to the software engineering context and suggest means of fostering it. Our paper will help software engineering researchers better select and then guide the application of a broader set of qualitative research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software process simulation models (SPSMs) that are based on descriptive process models offer the executability that can demonstrate dynamic changes of software processes over time. Verification and validation (V&V) is critical in SPSMs for guaranteeing the quality and reliability of models. V&V of dynamic software process models is more complex and challenging than for static software process models. This work systematically summarizes and maps V&V studies in SPSM to provide guidelines for future research and practice. Specifically, this study aims at identifying the focus of research on V&V, the methods used for V&V, and how to implement V&V of SPSMs in software engineering research. We conducted a systematic mapping study on studies of SPSMs that report on their V&V activities. Under the guidance of a V&V meta‐model for SPSMs, we study four research questions about V&V process. We identified 107 primary studies from a pool of 313 papers on SPSMs until 2021. There are two main results of our study. The first one presents the relationship between quality aspects of SPSMs and the V&V methods to assure them. The second result reveals the relationships among the modeling process, three modeling steps, five quality aspects, and 10 V&V methods. Generally, researchers do not pay sufficient attention to V&V, as 65.8% ((313−107)/313) failed to mention or elaborate on their V&V process. We systematically summarize and map the state‐of‐the‐art V&V research in software process modeling field to support modelers' practice and improve their V&V process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interoperability stands as a critical hurdle in developing and overseeing distributed and collaborative systems. Thus, it becomes imperative to gain a deep comprehension of the primary obstacles hindering interoperability and the essential criteria that systems must satisfy to achieve it. In light of this objective, in the initial phase of this research, we conducted a survey questionnaire involving stakeholders and practitioners engaged in distributed and collaborative systems. This effort resulted in the identification of eight essential interoperability requirements, along with their corresponding challenges. Then, the second part of our study encompassed a critical review of the literature to assess the effectiveness of prevailing conceptual approaches and associated technologies in addressing the identified requirements. This analysis led to the identification of a set of components that promise to deliver the desired interoperability by addressing the requirements identified earlier. These elements subsequently form the foundation for the third part of our study, a reference architecture for interoperability-fostering frameworks that is proposed in this paper. The results of our research can significantly impact the software engineering of interoperable systems by introducing their fundamental requirements and the best practices to address them, but also by identifying the key elements of a framework facilitating interoperability in Systems of Systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirements collection is difficult and a critical phase of software development life cycle, in particular in a global software development (GSD) environment. In GSD, clients and vendors are physically separated such that there exist challenges such as lack of face‐to‐face communication, language differences, culture variation, and time zone differences. The objective of current research is to identify critical challenges of requirement engineering in GSD. There is no work done yet to empirically analyze all possible challenges via questionnaire survey from software industries. This research paper empirically investigates and analyze the identified challenges from systematic literature review (SLR) based on a questionnaire survey. For this purpose, 50 respondents from different countries are organized. From this research, 13 challenges during requirements implementation in the context of GSD have been identified previously via SLR. These challenges were then evaluated using an empirical approach of questionnaire survey. The results from respondents were analyzed based on type of respondents, level of experience of respondents, and from client–vendor perspective. Finally, the challenges were prioritized based on its frequency of occurrences from the SLR and the questionnaire survey. The relationships between the challenges and the survey results were evaluated using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The results produced a 0.835 Spearman's correlation coefficient at significance level ρ = 0.000, which showed a strong positive correlation between the outcome of SLR and survey with no significant difference. The implication of this research work lies in both fundamental and practical perspective. The prioritized set of challenges was provided based on SLR, and questionnaire survey acts as a knowledge base for both researchers and industrial practitioners. This work will help researchers to identify challenges in GSD projects or other software engineering areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software engineers widely acknowledge the inclusion of security requirements in the early stages of the development process. However, the need to prepare the software for the failure of the implemented security controls and subsequent investigation of the incident is often not discussed. Forensic‐ready software systems represent an evolution of secure systems being designed for the eventual digital forensic investigation. However, their exact properties remain largely unexplored, beyond preliminary high‐level conceptualizations of requirements and capabilities. Further obstacles hindering the adoption of forensic‐ready software systems are the different priorities and goals of involved parties and a gap in the digital forensics expertise of software engineers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical qualitative study identifying the problems and needs of forensic readiness while framing the notion of an ideal forensic‐ready software system and how it should treat potential evidence. To this end, we conducted semisupervised interviews with digital forensics experts on their idea, experience, and suggestions. The results provide insights into the needs of the experts to facilitate the definition of correct requirements towards forensic‐ready software systems to support the anticipated investigations properly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software effort estimation is a vital process in the software industry for successfully administering 5Ds of the software development life cycle (SDLC). The 5Ds stand for demand, development, direction, deployment, and designated cost of the software. Software development effort estimation (SDEE) is an effort prediction mechanism to calculate the effort for the development of the software product in order to minimize the challenges in the software field. Academics and practitioners are striving to identify which machine learning estimation technique yields more accurate results based on evaluation metrics, datasets, and other pertinent aspects. The feature selection techniques impact accuracy by selecting the main and relevant features in the dataset and eliminating the redundant and irrelevant features in the dataset. To achieve accurate estimations, the paper utilizes feature selection algorithms, along with various machine learning techniques, which predict the desired effort and the performance of the model has been measured in terms of prediction accuracy, R2 value, relative error, and mean absolute error. The datasets China and Maxwell are trained with the relevant features by applying feature selection algorithms, and estimation techniques are applied to predict the effort. The performance is compared with the regression models and feature selection techniques utilized by many authors previously. The result of the proposed methodology significantly gives the best performance with the combination of feature selection and estimation models than all regression models when applied alone, to both datasets. From the results, it is perceptible that random forest is performing well with the feature selection techniques and obtains the highest prediction accuracy of 99.33% with the China and 89.47% with the Maxwell datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise architecture is a growing trend that aims to help deal with the complexity of socio‐technical systems such as human organizations, as well as their information technology and systems areas. Nevertheless, the contribution of enterprise architecture to the field of software engineering remains unclear. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to see how enterprise architecture is used in software development and maintenance practice. To this end, we first carried out a search in the SCOPUS database and then organized the papers according to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge to determine what areas of software engineering are covered by each research study. To understand how enterprise architecture is used, we established a classification based on ISO 42010 and TOGAF. From the systematic literature review, we noticed that the early stages of development are the most impacted by the enterprise architecture. On the other hand, we observed that enterprise architecture is of assistance in the areas of engineering management, engineering processes, and engineering models and methods; these tasks are carried out by teams or managers using different, often agile, development methods or standards. In turn, we found that the most common categories are architecture descriptions; these are often used to facilitate communication and information‐sharing between different stakeholders, in addition to frameworks, which will help to establish common practices in the organization related to the joint use of enterprise architecture and software development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the current state of the existing research on the application of Semantic web technologies in supporting customer relationship management. Its achievement includes providing answers to a set of research questions as a result of conducting a systematic literature review. A total of 44 scientific publications are identified as relevant to the topic and included in the review. Information is extracted from the selected literature sources, which is then summarized, systemized and analyzed according to the predefined research questions and finally reported. The conducted systematic literature review determines that the development of Semantic web technologies is provoked interest among researchers, as a result of which the advantages of using them for descriptions useful for various CRM purposes are investigated and practically confirmed. In addition to defining semantic models for descriptions supporting a variety of CRM activities and processes (such as customized products and services; supporting users of CRM systems; integrated offerings across channels; improved and innovative products and services; customer complaint management, etc.), various research works identify new approaches to support CRM, that can be achieved through the application of appropriate Semantic web technologies. The detailed study represented in this paper contributes to familiarization with the existing experience in the application of Semantic web technologies in supporting customer relationship management, as well as facilitates the discovery of trends and directions for future research. This is the reason for the expected interest from scientists whose research area cover the considered and similar fields; software engineers implementing CRM systems; data analysts exploring CRM domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an interdisciplinary approach aimed to bring into practice some novel Software Engineering theoretical paradigms. The premise of these news paradigms is based on the idea of "ecologies" as realities that take place in the environment of a Software product. These "ecologies" are understood as tight but flexible interactions between the human, social, and technical components involved, where Software is just another component. However, the theoretical paradigms discussed do not offer a viable way to make sense of these ecologies into the practice of Software design and development. Thus, as a more operationalized approach, this paper proposes a framework based on Networks of Activities, a concept derived from Activity Theory, as a resource to help in the design, development, and evolution of these new emergent complex socio‐technical ecologies. This framework has been conceived as a tool for the design, capture, and, especially, to analyze the evolution of these ecologies. The concepts and notations used by the proposed approach are illustrated through a proof of concept that shows the essential ideas and their use in real scenarios. In this way, the concepts discussed contribute to the improvement of related fields like Requirements Engineering, Human‐Computer Interaction, or Software Architecture, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is pervasive, humans may feel threatened or at risk by giving up control to machines. In this context, ethicality becomes a major concern to prevent AI systems from being biased, making mistakes, or going rogue. Requirements Engineering (RE) is the research area that can exert a great impact in the development of ethical systems by design. However, proposing concepts, tools and techniques that support the incorporation of ethicality into the software development processes as explicit requirements remains a great challenge in the RE field. In this paper, we rely on Ontology-based Requirements Engineering (ObRE) as a method to elicit and analyze ethicality requirements ('Ethicality requirements' is adopted as a name for the class of requirements studied in this paper by analogy to other quality requirements studied in software engineering, such as usability, reliability, and portability, etc. The use of this term (as opposed to 'ethical requirements') highlights that they represent requirements for ethical systems, analogous to how 'trustworthiness requirements' represent requirements for trustworthy systems. To put simply: the predicates 'ethical' or 'trustworthy' are not meant to be predicated over the requirements themselves). ObRE applies ontological analysis to ontologically unpack terms and notions that are referred to in requirements elicitation. Moreover, this method instantiates the adopted ontology and uses it to guide the requirements analysis activity. In a previous paper, we presented a solution concerning two ethical principles, namely Beneficence and Non-maleficence. The present paper extends the previous work by targeting two other important ethicality principles, those of Explicability and Autonomy. For each of these new principles, we do ontological unpacking of the relevant concepts, and we present requirements elicitation and analysis guidelines, as well as examples in the context of a driverless car case. Furthermore, we validate our approach by analysing the requirements elicitation made for the driverless car case in contrast with a similar case, and by assessing our method's coverage w.r.t European Union guidelines for Trustworthy AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction/purpose: This paper introduces a novel PMO EDUCT framework that encompasses Collaborative, Complementary, Sustained, and Simultaneous learning explicitly tailored for the dynamic landscape of software engineering. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on education and professional development in the digital era by illuminating the challenges faced, the framework developed, and the measurable outcomes achieved. The presented framework underscores the need for agility, adaptability, and a relentless pursuit of knowledge as fundamental tenets for success in an ever-evolving landscape. Methods: Focusing on a large software engineering organization, this study explores the multifaceted aspects of project management education, methodology enhancement, and team optimization. The proposed methodology combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to explore the educational process area in a global organization and generate a flexible and measurable framework to improve corporate knowledge growth. The framework aims to provide learners the most flexibility about learning paths, schedules, collaboration, and best practice exchange while guaranteeing proper alignment with frequent market changes and emerging PM skills. Results: Findings indicate that personalised, continuous learning, facilitated through collaborative environments and custom-tailored content, yields significant benefits. Through analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs), this study showcases improved project onboarding, enhanced team collaboration, and the cultivation of a culture of innovation. Conclusion: This paper presents the PMO EDUCT framework that organizations can use to create a learning culture and empower their employees to succeed in the constantly evolving field of software development. By adopting collaborative, complementary, sustained, and simultaneous learning principles, organizations can develop a workforce with the essential skills of critical thinking, collaboration, and adaptability necessary for success in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One major challenge of today's product development is to master the constantly increasing product complexity driven by the interactions between different disciplines, like mechanical, electrical and software engineering. An approach to master this complexity is function-oriented model-based systems engineering (MBSE). In order to guide the developer through the process of transferring requirements into a final product design, MBSE methods are essential. However, especially in mechanics, function-oriented product development is challenging, as functionality is largely determined by the physical effects that occur in the contacts of physical components. Currently, function-oriented MBSE methods enable either the modeling of contacts or of structures as part of physical components. To create seamless function-oriented mechanical system architectures, a holistic method for modeling contacts, structures and their dependencies is needed. Therefore, this paper presents an extension of the motego method to model structures, by which the seamless parametric modeling of function-oriented mechanical system architectures from requirements to the physical product is enabled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, the software engineering (SE) community has widely employed deep learning (DL) techniques in many source code processing tasks. Similar to other domains like computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), the state‐of‐the‐art DL techniques for source code processing can still suffer from adversarial vulnerability, where minor code perturbations can mislead a DL model's inference. Efficiently detecting such vulnerability to expose the risks at an early stage is an essential step and of great importance for further enhancement. This paper proposes a novel black‐box effective and high‐quality adversarial attack method, namely CodeBERT‐Attack (CBA), based on the powerful large pre‐trained model (i.e., CodeBERT) for DL models of source code processing. CBA locates the vulnerable positions through masking and leverages the power of CodeBERT to generate textual preserving perturbations. We turn CodeBERT against DL models and further fine‐tuned CodeBERT models for specific downstream tasks, and successfully mislead these victim models to erroneous outputs. In addition, taking the power of CodeBERT, CBA is capable of effectively generating adversarial examples that are less perceptible to programmers. Our in‐depth evaluation on two typical source code classification tasks (i.e., functionality classification and code clone detection) against the most widely adopted LSTM and the powerful fine‐tuned CodeBERT models demonstrate the advantages of our proposed technique in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Furthermore, our results also show (1) that pre‐training may help CodeBERT gain resilience against perturbations further, and (2) certain pre‐training tasks may be beneficial for adversarial robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary In software development, developer turnover is among the primary reasons for project failures, leading to a great void of knowledge and strain for newcomers. Unfortunately, no established methods exist to measure how the problem domain knowledge is distributed among developers. Awareness of how this knowledge evolves and is owned by key developers in a project helps stakeholders reduce risks caused by turnover. To this end, this paper introduces a novel, realistic representation of problem domain knowledge distribution: the ConceptRealm. To construct the ConceptRealm, we employ a latent Dirichlet allocation model to represent textual features obtained from 300 K issues and 1.3 M comments from 518 open‐source projects. We analyze whether the newly emerged issues and developers share similar concepts or how aligned the individual developers' concepts are with the team over time. We also investigate the impact of leaving developers on the frequency of concepts. Finally, we also evaluate the soundness of our approach on a closed‐source software project, thus allowing the validation of the results from a practical standpoint. We find out that the ConceptRealm can represent the problem domain knowledge within a project and can be utilized to predict the alignment of developers with issues. We also observe that projects exhibit many keepers independent of project maturity and that abruptly leaving keepers correlates with a decline of their core concepts as the remaining developers cannot quickly familiarize themselves with those concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is characterized as a shared computing and communication infrastructure. It encourages the efficient and effective developmental processes that are carried out in various organizations. Cloud computing offers both possibilities and solutions of problems for outsourcing and management of software developmental operations across distinct geography. Cloud computing is adopted by organizations and application developers for developing quality software. The cloud has the significant impact on utilizing the artificial complexity required in developing and designing quality software. Software developmental organization prefers cloud computing for outsourcing tasks because of its available and scalable nature. Cloud computing is the ideal choice utilized for development modern software as they have provided a completely new way of developing real‐time cost‐effective, efficient, and quality software. Tenants (providers, developers, and consumers) are provided with platforms, software services, and infrastructure based on pay per use phenomenon. Cloud‐based software services are becoming increasingly popular, as observed by their widespread use. Cloud computing approach has drawn the interest of researchers and business because of its ability to provide a flexible and resourceful platform for development and deployment. To determine a cohesive understanding of the analyzed problems and solutions to improve the quality of software, the existing literature resources on cloud‐based software development should be analyzed and synthesized systematically. Keyword strings were formulated for analyzing relevant research articles from journals, book chapters, and conference papers. The research articles published in (2011–2021) various scientific databases were extracted and analyzed for retrieval of relevant research articles. A total of 97 research publications are examined in this SLR and are evaluated to be appropriate studies in explaining and discussing the proposed topic. The major emphasis of the presented systematic literature review (SLR) is to identify the participating entities of cloud‐based software development, challenges associated with adopting cloud for software developmental processes, and its significance to software industries and developers. This SLR will assist organizations, designers, and developers to develop and deploy user‐friendly, efficient, effective, and real time software applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industry 4.0 marks a major technological shift, revolutionizing manufacturing with increased efficiency, productivity, and sustainability. This transformation is paralleled in agriculture through smart farming, employing similar advanced technologies to enhance agricultural practices. Both fields demonstrate a symmetry in their technological approaches. Recent advancements in software engineering and the digital twin paradigm are addressing the challenge of creating embedded software systems for these technologies. Digital twins allow full development of software systems before physical prototypes are made, exemplifying a cost-effective method for Industry 4.0 software development. Our digital twin prototype approach mirrors software operations within a virtual environment, integrating all sensor interfaces to ensure accuracy between emulated and real hardware. In essence, the digital twin prototype acts as a prototype of its physical counterpart, effectively substituting it for automated testing of physical twin software. This paper discusses a case study applying this approach to smart farming, specifically enhancing silage production. We also provide a lab study for independent replication of this approach. The source code for a digital twin prototype of a PiCar-X by SunFounder is available open-source on GitHub, illustrating how digital twins can bridge the gap between virtual simulations and physical operations, highlighting the symmetry between physical and digital twins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite potential benefits in Software Engineering, adoption of software modelling in industry is low. Technical issues such as tool support have gained significant research before, but individual guidance and training have received little attention. As a first step towards providing the necessary guidance in modelling, we conduct a systematic literature review to explore the current state of the art. We searched academic literature for guidance on model creation and selected 35 papers for full-text screening through three rounds of selection. We find research on model creation guidance to be fragmented, with inconsistent usage of terminology, and a lack of empirical validation or supporting evidence. We outline the different dimensions commonly used to provide guidance on software and system model creation. Additionally, we provide definitions of the three terms modelling method, style, and guideline as current literature lacks a well-defined distinction between them. These definitions can help distinguishing between important concepts and provide precise modelling guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business process modeling is a crucial aspect of domains such as Business Process Management and Software Engineering. The availability of various BPM languages in the market makes it challenging for process modelers to select the best-fit BPM language for a specific process modeling task. A decision model is necessary to systematically capture and make scattered knowledge on BPM languages available for reuse by process modelers and academics. This paper presents a decision model for the BPM language selection problem in research projects. The model contains mappings of 72 BPM features to 23 BPM languages. We validated and refined the decision model through 10 expert interviews with domain experts from various organizations. We evaluated the efficiency, validity, and generality of the decision model by conducting four case studies of academic research projects with their original researchers. The results confirmed that the decision model supports process modelers in the selection process by providing more insights into the decision process. Based on the empirical evidence from the case studies and domain expert feedback, we conclude that having the knowledge readily available in the decision model supports academics in making more informed decisions that align with their preferences and prioritized requirements. Furthermore, the captured knowledge provides a comprehensive overview of BPM languages, features, and quality characteristics that other researchers can employ to tackle future research challenges. Our observations indicate that BPMN is a commonly used modeling language for process modeling. Therefore, it is more sensible for academics to explain why they did not select BPMN than to discuss why they chose it for their research project(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent rise in internet usage, the volume of crucial, private, and confidential data traveling online has increased. Attackers have made attempts to break into the network due to weaknesses in the security mechanisms, gaining access to sensitive data that could disrupt the operation of the systems and jeopardize the confidentiality of the data. Intrusion detection systems, a key component of cybersecurity, were used to defend against these potential threats. Numerous review papers have examined various intrusion detection system (IDS) approaches for networks, many of which focused primarily on the anomaly-based IDS while paying less attention to the signature and hybrid-based approaches. Additionally, a lot of these studies took a non-systematic approach, comparing existing techniques, without taking into account the in-depth analytical synthesis of methodologies and results of the approaches to provide a thorough grasp of state-of-the-art. In order to provide a thorough assessment of the current status of Network IDS, this work provides an in-depth insight into what is attainable in the research of Anomaly, Signature, and Hybrid-Based methods by adhering to the principles of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses and guidelines for Software Engineering Domain. We discovered unexplored study topics and unsolved research issues based on the study's findings. We end by highlighting potential, high impact future research areas in order to improve the IDS model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of modular, yet reusable and interchangeable components offers flexibility for system designers and thus leads to a higher degree of reconfigurability with cost effective, adaptable and scalable solutions. The development of a robotic system remains, however, a complex task with increasing demands depending on the targeted capabilities, functionalities and operational constraints of the robot. This requires expert knowledge in mechanical, electrical and software engineering, as well as tools that can collect, process and use relevant data. As a result, the amount of available and managed information is increasing, while its relevance, usability, and knowledge that can be extracted from it are consequently decreasing: a situation described as information overload paradox. The design of a modular system can be based on the use of standardized modules with universal interconnects, but it should be aligned with a strong formalism, e. g. the semantic representation of components, to allow for a better management of the overall complexity. An ontology-based knowledge representation, for instance, which provides domain and application specific knowledge for the design of robotic systems, can be used as a method of storing and sharing data in a uniform, machine-readable and standardized way. In this paper, we introduce the Knowledge-based Open Robot voCabulary as Utility Toolkit (korcut) as a core component to support the ontology-driven development of robotic systems as part of a reference implementation of the Q-Rock development cycle. Q-Rock gathers methods to assist users in designing robot configuration by: (a) automatically exploring robot capabilities based on robot hardware, (b) proposing robot designs to meet the user's needs, (c) refining the proposed robot designs. We use korcut to improve the robot design process in orbital and planetary robotics from the requirements definition to the development phases of complex modular robotic structures (e. g. composition of an unmanned ground vehicle with robotic arms). This is implemented by embedding semantic component descriptions in a state-of-the-art open-source 3D modeling software. Furthermore, the korcut ontology family includes various sub-ontologies to address specific space-related tasks, such as the modeling of a Standard Interconnect (SI) for On Orbit Services (OOS) and Orbital Factory. The ontology design follows criteria that have been derived from a survey conducted as part of this work. This paper also covers an evaluation of its current applications from a methodological, knowledge representation, and software tool perspectives. In the application part, we introduce the use of the ontology to model a multi-functional SI that enables mechanical connections between various (modular) robotic components, as well as transfer of power and data. Finally, we provide a critical analysis of our work and outline its future work. • The development of complex robotic systems in space domain needs expert knowledge. • Increasing information about a robotic system can lead to an information paradox. • The information paradox can be improved by standardized and inferable knowledge. • Ontology is used in a case study to facilitate the robot development workflow. • Ontology is used to provide a metric for evaluating a space interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphor of "technical debt" is used in software engineering to describe technical solutions that may be pragmatic in the near‐term but may have a negative long‐term impact. Similar decisions and similar dynamics are present in the field of systems engineering. This work investigates the current body of knowledge to identify if, and how, the technical debt metaphor is used within the systems engineering field and which systems engineering lifecycle stages are most susceptible to technical debt. A systematic literature review was conducted on 354 papers in February 2022, of which 18 were deemed relevant for inclusion in the study. The results of the systematic literature review show that the technical debt metaphor is not prevalent within systems engineering research and that existing research is limited to specific fields and theoretical discussions. This paper concludes with recommendations for future work to establish a research agenda on the identification and management of technical debt within systems engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper focuses on a framework for structuring large document stores with the help of intelligent metadata. The described landscape includes a proprietary knowledge graph which ingests millions of concepts from external, third-party data providers and accommodates internal class taxonomies; an NLP service for automated annotation of textual data; an annotations quality control mechanism; tools for knowledge graph ontology and concept management; and an extensive API layer. The authors present an approach they have tested and proved successful in one of the leading media companies in the world, whose media content is a core data asset. The proposed solutions enable content analytics in their proper context and allow explicit and implicit connections between the content and other company data – i.e., user (media content consumer) data. The latter empowers the efficient application of advanced analytical models for searches and recommendations and the implementation of accurate data-driven virtual assistants. The paper advises addressing the metadata quality concerns, which the authors’ extensive practice identifies as an essential prerequisite for applied analytics delivering significant business value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In software engineering (SE) and in the computing disciplines, papers presented at conferences are considered as formal papers and counted when evaluating research productivity of academic staff. In spite of this, conference papers may still be extended for publication in academic journals. In this research, we have studied the process of extension from conference to journal publication, and tried to explain the different purposes these two forms of publication serve in the field. Twenty-two editors in chief and associate editors in chief of major publications in SE and related fields were interviewed, and 122 authors of extended versions of conference papers answered a Web questionnaire regarding the extension of their papers. As a result, the process of extending conference papers for journal publication in SE is recorded. In the conclusion, we comment on the following: (a) the role of the conference in the development of the research work; (b) the review process at the conference and at the journal stage; and (c) the different purposes conference and journal publication fulfill in SE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a summary of past, current, and future trends in software maintenance and reengineering research, we give in this editorial a retrospective look from the past 14 years to now. We provide insight on how software maintenance has evolved and on the most important research topics presented in the series of the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum computing is based on the principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, entanglement, measurement, and decoherence. The basic units of computation are qubits, which are abstract objects with a mathematical expression to implement the quantum mechanics principles. Alongside quantum hardware, software is a principal element for conducting quantum computing. The software consists of logic gates and quantum circuits that implement algorithms for the execution of quantum programs. Due to those characteristics, quantum computing is a paradigm that non-physics experts cannot understand. Under this new scheme for developing software, it is important to integrate a conceptual framework of the fundamentals on which quantum computing is based. In this paper, we present a kind of taxonomical view of the fundamental concepts of quantum computing and the derived concepts that integrate the emerging discipline of quantum software engineering. We performed a quasi-systematic mapping for conducting the systematic review because the objective of the review only intends to detect the fundamental concepts of quantum computing and quantum software. The results can help computer science students and professors as a starting point to address the study of this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The importance of the team, its internal dynamics, and its performance are widely recognized within the software engineering community. While popular frameworks identify wholeness, stability over time, and smallness as important factors, they offer little guidance on how to form teams that achieve these three characteristics. The objective of this study is to investigate how these team characteristics interact in large‐scale software development contexts, particularly focusing on the impact of stable and dynamic teaming approaches. This was done through a multivocal study of literature, followed by individual semi‐structured interviews with 19 engineers from two companies and validation workshops with an additional two companies from unrelated industry segments. The study results show that the question of stable versus dynamic approaches to forming software engineering teams is largely unaddressed in industry, with stable teams representing a habitual default option. Meanwhile, both stable and dynamic teams clearly have respective strengths and weaknesses, calling for careful consideration of the most suitable approach in any given situation. To support such consideration, this paper presents a model of how team stability, wholeness, and smallness interact. This model is found relevant, accurate, generalizable, and useful by practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An adaptive system is able to adapt at runtime to dynamically changing environments and to new requirements. Adaptive systems can be single adaptive entities or collective ones that consist of several collaborating entities. Rigorous engineering requires appropriate methods and tools that help guaranteeing that an adaptive system lives up to its intended purpose. This paper introduces the special section on "Rigorous Engineering of Collective Adaptive Systems." It presents the 11 contributions of the section categorizing them into five distinct research lines: correctness by design and synthesis, computing with bio-inspired communication, new system models, machine learning, and programming and analyzing ensembles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refactoring tools have advanced greatly and are being used in many large projects. As a result, a great deal of information is now available about past refactoring and its effects on the source code. However, when multiple refactoring is performed at once, it becomes more difficult to analyze their impact. Refactoring visualization can help developers create more maintainable code that is easier to understand and modify over time. Although there is an increasing interest in visualizing code changes in software engineering research, there has been relatively little research on visualizing the process of refactoring. In this paper, we propose a Radar Chart Refactoring Visualization (RcRV) approach to visualize software refactoring of source code across multiple software releases. Radar charts are a form of 2D visualization that can show multiple variables on a single chart. The RcRv receives input from developers or through refactoring identification tools, such as Ref-Finder, to generate charts. The generated charts can show the changes made during the refactoring process, highlighting areas of the trend of refactoring over evolution for multiple refactoring, multiple methods, and multiple classes. The evaluation study conducted to assess the usefulness of the RcRV tool has shown that the proposed tool is useful to developers, appealing, and easy to use. The proposed method of visualization can be beneficial for developers and maintainers to detect design violations and potential bugs in the code, thus saving time and effort during the development and maintenance process. Therefore, this research presents a significant contribution to the software engineering field by providing developers with an efficient tool to enhance code quality and maintainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of the smart contract can effectively reduce the search space and improve retrieval efficiency. The existing classification methods are based on natural language processing technologies. Because the processing of source code by these technologies lacks extraction and processing in the software engineering field, there is still a lot of room for improvement in their methods of feature extraction. Therefore, this paper proposes a multi-feature fusion method for smart contract classification (MFF-SC) based on the code processing technology. From the source code perspective, source code processing method and attention mechanism are used to extract local code features. Structure-based traversal method are used to extract global code features from abstract syntax tree. Local and global code features introduce attention mechanism to generate code semantic features. From the perspective of account transaction, the feature of account transaction is extracted by using TransR. Next, the code semantic features and account transaction features generate smart contract semantic features by an attention mechanism. Finally, the smart contract semantic features are fed into a stacked denoising autoencoder and a softmax classifier for classification. Experimental results on a real dataset show that MFF-SC achieves an accuracy rate of 83.9%, compared with other baselines and variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerabilities in the source code of the software are critical issues in the realm of software engineering. Coping with vulnerabilities in software source code is becoming more challenging due to several aspects such as complexity and volume. Deep learning has gained popularity throughout the years as a means of addressing such issues. This paper proposes an evaluation of vulnerability detection performance on source code representations and evaluates how machine learning (ML) strategies can improve them. The structure of our experiment consists of three deep neural networks (DNNs) in conjunction with five different source code representations: abstract syntax trees (ASTs), code gadgets (CGs), semantics‐based vulnerability candidates (SeVCs), lexed code representations (LCRs), and composite code representations (CCRs). Experimental results show that employing different ML strategies in conjunction with the base model structure influences the performance results to a varying degree. However, ML‐based techniques suffer from poor performance on class imbalance handling and dimensionality reduction when used in conjunction with source code representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial control applications are usually designed by domain experts instead of software engineers. These experts frequently use visual programming languages based on standards such as IEC 61131-3 and IEC 61499. The standards apply model-based engineering concepts to abstract from hardware and low-level communication. Developing industrial control software is challenging due to the fact that control systems are usually unique and need to be maintained for many years. The arising challenges, together with the growing complexity of control software, require very usable model-based development environments for visual programming languages. However, so far only little empirical research exists on the practical usefulness of such environments, i.e., their usability and utility. In this paper, we discuss common control software maintenance tasks and tool capabilities based on existing research and show the realization of these capabilities in the 4diac IDE. We performed a walkthrough of the demonstrated capabilities using the cognitive dimensions of notations framework from the field of human–computer interaction. We then improved the tool and conducted a user study involving ten industrial automation engineers, who used the 4diac IDE in a realistic control software maintenance scenario. Based on lessons learnt from this study, we adapted the 4diac IDE to better handle large graphical models. We evaluated these changes in a reassessment study with automation engineers from seven industrial enterprises. We derive general implications with respect to large-scale applications for developers of IDEs that we deem applicable in the context of (visual) model-based engineering tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]