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Many modern software systems are built as a set of autonomous software components (also called agents) that collaborate with each other and are situated in an environment. To keep these multiagent systems operational under abnormal circumstances, it is crucial to make them resilient. Existing solutions are often centralised and rely on information manually provided by experts at design time, making such solutions rigid and limiting the autonomy and adaptability of the system. In this work, we propose a cooperative strategy focused on the identification of the root causes of quality requirement violations in multiagent systems. This strategy allows agents to cooperate with each other in order to identify whether these violations come from service providers, associated components, or the communication infrastructure. From this identification process, agents are able to adapt their behaviour in order to mitigate and solve existing abnormalities with the aim of normalising system operation. This strategy consists of an interaction protocol that, together with the proposed algorithms, allow agents playing the protocol roles to diagnose problems to be repaired. We evaluate our proposal with the implementation of a service-oriented system. The results demonstrate that our solution enables the correct identification of different sources of failures, favouring the selection of the most suitable actions to be taken to overcome abnormal situations.

Modern Code Review (MCR) is an informal tool-assisted quality assurance practice. It relies on the asynchronous communication among the authors of code changes and reviewers, who are developers that provide feedback. However, from candidate developers, some are able to provide better feedback than others given a particular context. The selection of reviewers is thus an important task, which can benefit from automated support. Many approaches have been proposed in this direction, using for example data from code review repositories to recommend reviewers. In this paper, we propose the use of team-related features to improve the performance of predictions that are helpful to build code reviewer recommenders, with our target predictions being the identification of reviewers that would participate in a review and the provided amount of feedback. We evaluate the prediction power of these features, which are related to code ownership, workload, and team relationship. This evaluation was done by carefully addressing challenges imposed by the MCR domain, such as temporal aspects of the dataset and unbalanced classes. Moreover, given that it is currently unknown how much past data is needed for building MCR prediction models with acceptable performance, we explore the amount of past data used to build prediction models. Our results show that, individually, features related to code ownership have the best prediction power. However, based on feature selection, we conclude that all proposed features together with lines of code can make the best predictions for both reviewer participation and amount of feedback. Regarding the amount of past data, the timeframes of 3, 6, 9, and 12 months of data produce similar results. Therefore, models can be trained considering short timeframes, thus reducing the computational costs with negligible impact in the prediction performance ...

Mental health disorders affect a large number of people, leading to many lives being lost every year. These disorders affect struggling individuals and businesses whose productivity decreases due to days of lost work or lower employee performance. Recent studies provide alarming numbers of individuals who suffer from mental health disorders, e.g., depression and anxiety, in particular contexts, such as academia. In the context of the software industry, there are limited studies that aim to understand the presence of mental health disorders and the characteristics of jobs in this context that can be triggers for the deterioration of the mental health of software professionals. In this paper, we present the results of a survey with 500 software professionals. We investigate different aspects of their mental health and the characteristics of their work to identify possible triggers of mental health deterioration. Our results provide the first evidence that mental health is a critical issue to be addressed in the software industry, as well as raise the direction of changes that can be done in this context to improve the mental health of software professionals., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

Monitoring software systems at runtime is key for understanding workloads, debugging, and self-adaptation. It typically involves collecting and storing observable software data, which can be analyzed online or offline. Despite the usefulness of collecting system data, it may significantly impact the system execution by delaying response times and competing with system resources. The typical approach to cope with this is to filter portions of the system to be monitored and to sample data. Although these approaches are a step towards achieving a desired trade-off between the amount of collected information and the impact on the system performance, they focus on collecting data of a particular type or may capture a sample that does not correspond to the actual system behavior. In response, we propose an adaptive runtime monitoring process to dynamically adapt the sampling rate while monitoring software systems. It includes algorithms with statistical foundations to improve the representativeness of collected samples without compromising the system performance. Our evaluation targets five applications of a widely used benchmark. It shows that the error (RMSE) of the samples collected with our approach is 9-54% lower than the main alternative strategy (sampling rate inversely proportional to the throughput), with 1-6% higher performance impact., Comment: in Journal of Systems and Software

Logging plays a crucial role in software engineering because it is key to perform various tasks including debugging, performance analysis, and detection of anomalies. Despite the importance of log data, the practice of logging still suffers from the lack of common guidelines and best practices. Recent studies investigated logging in C/C++ and Java open-source systems. In this paper, we complement these studies by conducting the first empirical study on logging practices in the Linux kernel, one of the most elaborate open-source development projects in the computer industry. We analyze 22 Linux releases with a focus on three main aspects: the pervasiveness of logging in Linux, the types of changes made to logging statements, and the rationale behind these changes. Our findings show that logging code accounts for 3.73% of the total source code in the Linux kernel, distributed across 72.36% of Linux files. We also found that the distribution of logging statements across Linux subsystems and their components vary significantly with no apparent reasons, suggesting that developers use different criteria when logging. In addition, we observed a slow decrease in the use of logging-reduction of 9.27% between versions v4.3 and v5.3. The majority of changes in logging code are made to fix language issues, modify log levels, and upgrade logging code to use new logging libraries, with the overall goal of improving the precision and consistency of the log output. Many recommendations are derived from our findings such as the use of static analysis tools to detect log-related issues, the adoption of common writing styles to improve the quality of log messages, the development of conventions to guide developers when selecting log levels, the establishment of review sessions to review logging code, and so on. [...], Comment: Accepted for publication in the Empirical Software Engineering journal

Performance and scalability requirements have a fundamental role in most large-scale software applications. To satisfy such requirements, caching is often used at various levels and infrastructure layers. Application-level caching -- or memoization -- is an increasingly used form of caching within the application boundaries, which consists of storing the results of computations in memory to avoid re-computing them. This is typically manually done by developers, who identify caching opportunities in the code and write additional code to manage the cache content. The task of identifying caching opportunities is a challenge because it requires the analysis of workloads and code locations where it is feasible and beneficial to cache objects. To aid developers in this task, there are approaches that automatically identify cacheable methods. Although such approaches have been individually evaluated, their effectiveness has not been compared. We thus in this paper present an empirical evaluation to compare the method recommendations made by the two existing application-level caching approaches at the method level, namely APLCache and MemoizeIt, using seven open-source web applications. We analyse the recommendations made by each approach as well as the hits, misses and throughput achieved with their valid caching recommendations. Our results show that the effectiveness of both approaches largely depends on the specific application, the presence of invalid recommendations and additional configurations, such as the time-to-live. By inspecting the obtained results, we observed in which cases the recommendations of each approach fail and succeed, which allowed us to derive a set of seven lessons learned that give directions for future approaches to support developers in the adoption of this type of caching.

The understanding of the behavioral aspects of a software system is an essential enabler for many software engineering activities, such as adaptation. This involves collecting runtime data from the system so that it is possible to analyze the collected data to guide actions upon the system. Consequently, software monitoring imposes practical challenges because it is often done by intercepting the system execution and recording gathered information. Such monitoring may degrade the performance and disrupt the system execution to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we introduce a two-phase monitoring approach to support the monitoring step in adaptive systems. The first phase collects lightweight coarse-grained information and identifies relevant parts of the software that should be monitored in detail based on a provided domain-specific language. This language is informed by a systematic literature review. The second phase collects relevant and fine-grained information needed for deciding whether and how to adapt the managed system. Our approach is implemented as a framework, called Tigris, that can be seamlessly integrated into existing software systems to support monitoring-based activities. To validate our proposal, we instantiated Tigris to support an application-level caching approach, which adapts caching decisions of a software system at runtime to improve its performance., Comment: in Journal of Systems and Software

Modern Code Review (MCR) is a widely known practice of software quality assurance. However, the existing body of knowledge of MCR is currently not understood as a whole. Objective: Our goal is to identify the state of the art on MCR, providing a structured overview and an in-depth analysis of the research done in this field. Method: We performed a systematic literature review, selecting publications from four digital libraries. Results: A total of 139 papers were selected and analyzed in three main categories. Foundational studies are those that analyze existing or collected data from the adoption of MCR. Proposals consist of techniques and tools to support MCR, while evaluations are studies to assess an approach or compare a set of them. Conclusion: The most represented category is foundational studies, mainly aiming to understand the motivations for adopting MCR, its challenges and benefits, and which influence factors lead to which MCR outcomes. The most common types of proposals are code reviewer recommender and support to code checking. Evaluations of MCR-supporting approaches have been done mostly offline, without involving human subjects. Five main research gaps have been identified, which point out directions for future work in the area.

A new form of caching, namely application-level caching, has been recently employed in web applications to improve their performance and increase scalability. It consists of the insertion of caching logic into the application base code to temporarily store processed content in memory, and then decrease the response time of web requests by reusing this content. However, caching at this level demands knowledge of the domain and application specificities to achieve caching benefits, given that this information supports decisions such as what and when to cache content. Developers thus must manually manage the cache, possibly with the help of existing libraries and frameworks. Given the increasing popularity of application-level caching, we thus provide a survey of approaches proposed in this context. We provide a comprehensive introduction to web caching and application-level caching, and present state-of-the-art work on designing, implementing and managing application-level caching. Our focus is not only on static solutions but also approaches that adaptively adjust caching solutions to avoid the gradual performance decay that caching can suffer over time. This survey can be used as a start point for researchers and developers, who aim to improve application-level caching or need guidance in designing application-level caching solutions, possibly with humans out-of-the-loop.

Meeting performance and scalability requirements while delivering services is a critical issue in web applications. Recently, latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users' demands and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Application-level caching, in which developers manually control cached content, has been adopted when traditional forms of caching are insufficient to meet such requirements. Despite its popularity, this level of caching is typically addressed in an ad hoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. Among all the issues involved with application-level caching, the decision of what should be cached must frequently be adjusted to cope with the application evolution and usage, making it a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an automated caching approach to automatically identify application-level cache content at runtime by monitoring system execution and adaptively managing caching decisions. Our approach is implemented as a framework that can be seamlessly integrated into new and existing web applications. In addition to the reduction of the effort required from developers to develop a caching solution, an empirical evaluation showed that our approach significantly speeds up and improves hit ratios with improvements ranging from 2.78% to 17.18%.

Latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users' demands, and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Despite its popularity, this level of caching involves the manual implementation by developers and is typically addressed in an ad-hoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study of how developers handle caching logic in their web applications, which involved the investigation of ten software projects with different characteristics. The study we designed is based on comparative and interactive principles of grounded theory, and the analysis of our data allowed us to extract and understand how developers address cache-related concerns to improve performance and scalability of their web applications. Based on our analysis, we derived guidelines and patterns, which guide developers while designing, implementing and maintaining application-level caching, thus supporting developers in this challenging task that is crucial for enterprise web applications.

Application-level caching is a form of caching that has been increasingly adopted to satisfy performance and throughput requirements. The key idea is to store the results of a computation, to improve performance by reusing instead of recomputing those results. However, despite its provided gains, this form of caching imposes new design, implementation and maintenance challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of application-level caching, highlighting its benefits as well as the challenges and the issues to adopt it. We introduce three kinds of existing support that have been proposed, giving a broad view of research in the area. Finally, we present important open challenges that remain unaddressed, hoping to inspire future work on addressing them., Comment: in IEEE Software

Engineering collective adaptive systems (CAS) with learning capabilities is a challenging task due to their multi-dimensional and complex design space. Data-driven approaches for CAS design could introduce new insights enabling system engineers to manage the CAS complexity more cost-effectively at the design-phase. This paper introduces a systematic approach to reason about design choices and patterns of learning-based CAS. Using data from a systematic literature review, reasoning is performed with a novel application of data-driven methodologies such as clustering, multiple correspondence analysis and decision trees. The reasoning based on past experience as well as supporting novel and innovative design choices are demonstrated.

Reputation is crucial to enabling human or software agents to select among alternative providers. Although several effective reputation assessment methods exist, they typically distil reputation into a numerical representation, with no accompanying explanation of the rationale behind the assessment. Such explanations would allow users or clients to make a richer assessment of providers, and tailor selection according to their preferences and current context. In this paper, we propose an approach to explain the rationale behind assessments from quantitative reputation models, by generating arguments that are combined to form explanations. Our approach adapts, extends and combines existing approaches for explaining decisions made using multi-attribute decision models in the context of reputation. We present example argument templates, and describe how to select their parameters using explanation algorithms. Our proposal was evaluated by means of a user study, which followed an existing protocol. Our results give evidence that although explanations present a subset of the information of trust scores, they are sufficient to equally evaluate providers recommended based on their trust score. Moreover, when explanation arguments reveal implicit model information, they are less persuasive than scores.

The agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS) paradigm has been used to analyze, reproduce, and predict phenomena related to many application areas. Although there are many agent-based platforms that support simulation development, they rely on programming languages that require extensive programming knowledge. Model-driven development (MDD) has been explored to facilitate simulation modeling, by means of high-level modeling languages that provide reusable building blocks that hide computational complexity, and code generation. However, there is still limited knowledge of how MDD approaches to ABMS contribute to increasing development productivity and quality. We thus in this paper present an empirical study that quantitatively compares the use of MDD and ABMS platforms mainly in terms of effort and developer mistakes. Our evaluation was performed using MDD4ABMS-an MDD approach with a core and extensions to two application areas, one of which developed for this study-and NetLogo, a widely used platform. The obtained results show that MDD4ABMS requires less effort to develop simulations with similar (sometimes better) design quality than NetLogo, giving evidence of the benefits that MDD can provide to ABMS.

With the recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, an increasing number of decision-making tasks are delegated to software systems. A key requirement for the success and adoption of such systems is that users must trust system choices or even fully automated decisions. To achieve this, explanation facilities have been widely investigated as a means of establishing trust in these systems since the early years of expert systems. With today's increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms, new challenges in the context of explanations, accountability, and trust towards such systems constantly arise. In this work, we systematically review the literature on explanations in advice-giving systems. This is a family of systems that includes recommender systems, which is one of the most successful classes of advice-giving software in practice. We investigate the purposes of explanations as well as how they are generated, presented to users, and evaluated. As a result, we derive a novel comprehensive taxonomy of aspects to be considered when designing explanation facilities for current and future decision support systems. The taxonomy includes a variety of different facets, such as explanation objective, responsiveness, content and presentation. Moreover, we identified several challenges that remain unaddressed so far, for example related to fine-grained issues associated with the presentation of explanations and how explanation facilities are evaluated.

Background: Collaboration among software engineers through face-to-face discussions in teams has been promoted since the adoption of agile methods. However, these discussions might demote the contribution of software engineers who are introverts, possibly leading to sub-optimal solutions and creating work environments that benefit extroverts. Objective: We aim to evaluate whether providing software engineers with time to work individually and reason about a collective problem is a setting that makes introverts more comfortable to interact and contribute more, ultimately leading to better solutions. Method: We plan to conduct a between-subjects study, with teams in a control group that design a software architecture in a team discussion meeting and teams in a treatment group in which subjects work individually before engaging in a meeting. We will assess and compare the amount of contribution of introverts, their subjective experiences, and the designed solutions. Limitations: As extroverts will be present in both groups, we will not be able to conclude that better solutions are solely due to the increased participation of introverts. The analyses of their subjective experience and amount of contributions might provide evidence to suggest the reasons for observed differences., Comment: 5 pages