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The growing popularity of mobile and cloud computing raises new challenges related to energy efficiency. This work evaluates four various SQL and NoSQL database solutions in terms of energy efficiency. Namely, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, and MySQL are taken into consideration. This study measures energy efficiency of the chosen data storage solutions on a selected set of physical and virtual computing nodes by leveraging Intel RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) technology. Various database usage scenarios are considered in this evaluation including both local usage and remote offloading. Different workloads are benchmarked through the use of YCSB (Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark) tool. Extensive experimental results show that (i) Redis and MongoDB are more efficient in energy consumption under most usage scenarios, (ii) remote offloading saves energy if the network latency is low and destination CPU is significantly more powerful, and (iii) computationally weaker CPUs may sometimes demonstrate higher energy efficiency in terms of J/ops. An energy efficiency measurement framework is proposed in order to evaluate and compare different database solutions based on the obtained experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global software engineering education (GSEE) is aimed at providing software engineering (SE) students with knowledge, skills, and understanding of working in globally distributed arrangements so they can be prepared for the global SE (GSE) paradigm. It is important to understand the challenges involved in GSEE for improving the quality and experience of educators and students. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study on the socio-cultural aspects of GSEE. A case study was conducted involving 14 participants from ten different universities in eight countries. The data was analyzed using grounded theory's open coding procedure. The key contributions of this paper are the identification and description of seven dimensions of socio-cultural distance that caused several significant challenges in the courses: 1) language differences; 2) concept of time; 3) attitude toward grades; 4) assumptions about national culture; 5) differences in autonomy; 6) influence of the course lecturer; and 7) work habits. Recommendations from this paper that are expected to benefit GSEE educators and students include: cross-cultural orientation of students prior to the course; use of various strategies to support better comprehension of different English accents (e.g., speaking slowly, replaying recorded video messages, and text chatting); and educators familiarizing themselves and their students with the relevant GSE and GSEE literature.

Command, Control, Communication, and Intelligence (C3I) systems are increasingly used in critical civil and military domains for achieving information superiority, operational efficacy, and greater situational awareness. The critical civil and military domains include, but are not limited to, battlefield, healthcare, transportation, and rescue missions. Given the sensitive nature and modernization of tactical domains, the security of C3I systems has recently become a critical concern. This is because cyber-attacks on C3I systems have catastrophic consequences including loss of human lives. Despite the increasing number of cyber-attacks on C3I systems and growing concerns about C3I systems' security, there is a paucity of a comprehensive review to systematize the body of knowledge on the security of C3I systems. Therefore, in this article, we have gathered, analyzed, and synthesized the body of knowledge on the security of C3I systems. We have identified and reported security vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and countermeasures/defenses for C3I systems. In particular, this article has enabled us to (i) propose a taxonomy for security vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and countermeasures; (ii) interrelate attack vectors with security vulnerabilities and countermeasures; and (iii) propose future research directions for advancing the state-of-the-art on the security of C3I systems. We believe that our findings will serve as a guideline for practitioners and researchers to advance the state-of-the-practice and state-of-the-art on the security of C3I systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms integrate and orchestrate a wide variety of security tools to accelerate the operational activities of Security Operation Center (SOC). Integration of security tools in a SOAR platform is mostly done manually using APIs, plugins, and scripts. SOC teams need to navigate through API calls of different security tools to find a suitable API to define or update an incident response action. Analyzing various types of API documentation with diverse API format and presentation structure involves significant challenges such as data availability, data heterogeneity, and semantic variation for automatic identification of security tool APIs specific to a particular task. Given these challenges can have negative impact on SOC team’s ability to handle security incident effectively and efficiently, we consider it important to devise suitable automated support solutions to address these challenges. We propose a novel learning-based framework for automated security tool API Recommendation for security Orchestration, automation, and response, APIRO. To mitigate data availability constraint, APIRO enriches security tool API description by applying a wide variety of data augmentation techniques. To learn data heterogeneity of the security tools and semantic variation in API descriptions, APIRO consists of an API-specific word embedding model and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model that are used for prediction of top three relevant APIs for a task. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of APIRO in recommending APIs for different tasks using three security tools and 36 augmentation techniques. Our experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of APIRO for achieving 91.9% Top-1 Accuracy. Compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, APIRO is 26.93%, 23.03%, and 20.87% improved in terms of Top-1, Top-2, and Top-3 Accuracy and outperforms the baseline by 23.7% in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2009.08.032 Byline: Antony Tang (a), Paris Avgeriou (b), Anton Jansen (b), Rafael Capilla (c), Muhammad Ali Babar (d) Keywords: Architectural knowledge management tool; Architectural design; Design rationale Abstract: Recent research suggests that architectural knowledge, such as design decisions, is important and should be recorded alongside the architecture description. Different approaches have emerged to support such architectural knowledge (AK) management activities. However, there are different notions of and emphasis on what and how architectural activities should be supported. This is reflected in the design and implementation of existing AK tools. To understand the current status of software architecture knowledge engineering and future research trends, this paper compares five architectural knowledge management tools and the support they provide in the architecture life-cycle. The comparison is based on an evaluation framework defined by a set of 10 criteria. The results of the comparison provide insights into the current focus of architectural knowledge management support, their advantages, deficiencies, and conformance to the current architectural description standard. Based on the outcome of this comparison a research agenda is proposed for future work on AK tools. Author Affiliation: (a) Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia (b) University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands (c) Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain (d) University of Limerick, Ireland Article History: Received 14 July 2008; Revised 24 August 2009; Accepted 24 August 2009 Article Note: (footnote) [star] All authors have contributed equally to this work.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2006.10.038 Byline: Muhammad Ali Babar, June M. Verner, Phong Thanh Nguyen Keywords: Software outsourcing; Global software development; Trust in outsourcing relationship; Software development in Vietnam; Empirical software engineering; Software process improvement Abstract: Our research objective is to understand software outsourcing practitioners' perceptions of the role of trust in managing client-vendor relationships and the factors that are critical to trust in off-shore software outsourcing relationships. Participants were 12 Vietnamese software development practitioners developing software for Far Eastern, European, and American clients. They identified that cultural understanding, creditability, capabilities, and personal visits are important factors in gaining the initial trust of a client, while cultural understanding, communication strategies, contract conformance, and timely delivery are vital factors in maintaining that trust. We contrast Vietnamese and Indian practitioners' views on factors affecting trust relationships. Author Affiliation: Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia and University of New South Wales, Locked Bag 9013, Alexandria, New South Wales 1435, Australia Article History: Received 1 July 2006; Revised 22 October 2006; Accepted 23 October 2006

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2006.04.029 Byline: Antony Tang (a), Muhammad Ali Babar (b), Ian Gorton (b), Jun Han (a) Keywords: Design rationale; Software architecture; Survey Abstract: Many claims have been made about the consequences of not documenting design rationale. The general perception is that designers and architects usually do not fully understand the critical role of systematic use and capture of design rationale. However, there is to date little empirical evidence available on what design rationale mean to practitioners, how valuable they consider it, and how they use and document it during the design process. This paper reports a survey of practitioners to probe their perception of the value of design rationale and how they use and document the background knowledge related to their design decisions. Based on 81 valid responses, this study has discovered that practitioners recognize the importance of documenting design rationale and frequently use them to reason about their design choices. However, they have indicated barriers to the use and documentation of design rationale. Based on the findings, we conclude that further research is needed to develop methodology and tool support for design rationale capture and usage. Furthermore, we put forward some specific research questions about design rationale that could be further investigated to benefit industry practice. Author Affiliation: (a) Faculty of ICT, Swinburne University of Technology, John Street, Hawthorn, Melbourne, Vic. 3122, Australia (b) National ICT Australia Ltd. and University of NSW, Australia Article History: Received 17 January 2006; Revised 25 April 2006; Accepted 26 April 2006

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2005.06.043 Byline: Muhammad Ali Babar, Barbara Kitchenham, Liming Zhu, Ian Gorton, Ross Jeffery Keywords: Software architecture evaluation; Groupware systems; Empirical software engineering; Distributed software development; Software process improvement Abstract: Software architecture evaluation is an effective means of addressing quality related issues early in the software development lifecycle. Scenario-based approaches to evaluate architecture usually involve a large number of stakeholders, who need to be collocated for face-to-face evaluation meetings. Collocating a large number of stakeholders is an expensive and time-consuming exercise, which may prove to be a hurdle in the wide-spread adoption of disciplined architectural evaluation practices. Drawing upon the successful introduction of groupware applications to support geographically distributed teams in software inspection, and requirements engineering disciplines, we propose the concept of distributed architectural evaluation using Internet-based collaborative technologies. This paper presents a pilot study used to assess the viability of a larger experiment intended to investigate the feasibility of groupware support for distributed software architecture evaluation. In addition, the results of the pilot study provide some preliminary findings on the viability of groupware-supported software architectural evaluation process. Author Affiliation: Empirical Software Engineering, National ICT Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Article History: Received 6 December 2004; Accepted 20 June 2005

Software traceability plays a critical role in software maintenance and evolution. We conducted a systematic mapping study with six research questions to understand the benefits, costs, and challenges of using traceability in maintenance and evolution. We systematically selected, analyzed, and synthesized 63 studies published between January 2000 and May 2020, and the results show that traceability supports 11 maintenance and evolution activities, among which change management is the most frequently supported activity; strong empirical evidence from industry is needed to validate the impact of traceability on maintenance and evolution; easing the process of change management is the main benefit of deploying traceability practices; establishing and maintaining traceability links is the main cost of deploying traceability practices; 13 approaches and 32 tools that support traceability in maintenance and evolution were identified; improving the quality of traceability links, the performance of using traceability approaches, and tools are the main traceability challenges in maintenance and evolution. The findings of this study provide a comprehensive understanding of deploying traceability practices in software maintenance and evolution phase and can be used by researchers for future directions and practitioners for making informed decisions while using traceability in maintenance and evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep Learning (DL) techniques for Natural Language Processing have been evolving remarkably fast. Recently, the DL advances in language modeling, machine translation, and paragraph understanding are so prominent that the potential of DL in Software Engineering cannot be overlooked, especially in the field of program learning. To facilitate further research and applications of DL in this field, we provide a comprehensive review to categorize and investigate existing DL methods for source code modeling and generation. To address the limitations of the traditional source code models, we formulate common program learning tasks under an encoder-decoder framework. After that, we introduce recent DL mechanisms suitable to solve such problems. Then, we present the state-of-the-art practices and discuss their challenges with some recommendations for practitioners and researchers as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations use diverse types of security solutions to prevent cyber-attacks. Multiple vendors provide security solutions developed using heterogeneous technologies and paradigms. Hence, it is a challenging rather impossible to easily make security solutions to work an integrated fashion. Security orchestration aims at smoothly integrating multivendor security tools that can effectively and efficiently interoperate to support security staff of a Security Operation Centre (SOC). Given the increasing role and importance of security orchestration, there has been an increasing amount of literature on different aspects of security orchestration solutions. However, there has been no effort to systematically review and analyze the reported solutions. We report a Multivocal Literature Review that has systematically selected and reviewed both academic and grey (blogs, web pages, white papers) literature on different aspects of security orchestration published from January 2007 until July 2017. The review has enabled us to provide a working definition of security orchestration and classify the main functionalities of security orchestration into three main areas—unification, orchestration, and automation. We have also identified the core components of a security orchestration platform and categorized the drivers of security orchestration based on technical and socio-technical aspects. We also provide a taxonomy of security orchestration based on the execution environment, automation strategy, deployment type, mode of task and resource type. This review has helped us to reveal several areas of further research and development in security orchestration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary software systems operate in heterogeneous, dynamic, and distributed environments, where security needs change at runtime. The security solutions for such systems need to be adaptive for the continuous satisfaction of the software systems' security goals.Whilst the existing research on self-adaptive security has made notable advancement towards designing and engineering self-adaptive security solutions, there exists little work on the taxonomic analysis of the architectures of the reported research and its applicability for open and ultra-large environments.We propose an architecture-centric taxonomy for mapping and comparing the current research and identifying the future research directions in this field. The proposed taxonomy has been used to review the representative work on the architectural characteristics that self-adaptive security systems must maintain for their effective application in large-scale open environments.We reflect on the findings from the taxonomic analysis and discuss the design principles, research challenges and limitations reported in the state of the art and practice.We outline the directions for the future research on architectural level support for self-adaptive security systems for large-scale open environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing systems by integrating Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly gaining importance in the software industry. Although the literature claims that this approach highly impacts Requirements Engineering (RE) practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence to demonstrate this statement. To explore and understand problems and challenges of current system requirement-OSS component matching and mismatches resolution practices in software development projects that integrate one or more OSS components into their software products. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 respondents that have performed RE activities in software development projects that integrate OSS components in 25 different software development companies in Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study uncovers 15 observations regarding system requirements-OSS components matching and mismatch resolution practices used in industrial projects that integrate OSS components. The assessed projects focused mainly on pre-release stages of software applications that integrate OSS components in an opportunistic way. The results also provide details of a set of previously unexplored scenarios when solving system requirement-OSS component mismatches; and clarify some challenges and related problems. For instance, although licensing issues and the potential changes in OSS components by their corresponding communities and/or changes in system requirements have been greatly discussed in the RE literature as problems for OSS component integration, they did not appear to be relevant in our assessed projects. Instead, practitioners highlighted the problem of getting suitable OSS component documentation/information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advances allow more physical objects to connect to the Internet and provide their services on theWeb as resources. Search engines are the key to fully utilize this emerging Web of Things, as they bridge users and applications with resources needed for their operation. Developing these systems is a challenging and diverse endeavor due to the diversity ofWeb of Things resources that they work with. Each combination of resources in query resolution process requires a different type of search engine with its own technical challenges and usage scenarios. This diversity complicates both the development of new systems and assessment of the state of the art. In this article, we present a systematic survey on Web of Things Search Engines (WoTSE), focusing on the diversity in forms of these systems. We collect and analyze over 200 related academic works to build a flexible conceptual model for WoTSE. We develop an analytical framework on this model to review the development of the field and its current status, reflected by 30 representative works in the area. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open issues to bridge the gap between the existing progress and an ideal WoTSE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the challenges of and potential solutions to architecting cloud-based systems is rapidly growing but is scattered. It is important to systematically analyze and synthesize the existing research on architecting cloud-based software systems in order to build a cohesive body of knowledge of the reported challenges and solutions. We have systematically identified and reviewed 133 papers that report architecture-related challenges and solutions for cloud-based software systems. This paper reports the methodological details, findings, and implications of a systematic review that has enabled us to identify 44 unique categories of challenges and associated solutions for architecting cloud-based software systems. We assert that the identified challenges and solutions classified into the categories form a body of knowledge that can be leveraged for designing or evaluating software architectures for cloud-based systems. Our key conclusions are that a large number of primary studies focus on middleware services aimed at achieving scalability, performance, response time, and efficient resource optimization. Architecting cloud-based systems presents unique challenges as the systems to be designed range from pervasive embedded systems and enterprise applications to smart devices with Internet of Things. We also conclude that there is a huge potential of research on architecting cloud-based systems in areas related to green computing, energy efficient systems, mobile cloud computing, and Internet of Things. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]