The JOT Blog

This special issue contains three extended and peer reviewed papers from the 18th edition of the Ibero-American Conference on Software Engineering (CIBSE), which was held in Lima, Peru from April 22 to 24, 2015. CIBSE was conceived as a space dedicated to the dissemination of research results and activities, encouraging dialogue between scientists, educators, professionals and students of Software Engineering.

CIBSE consists of three tracks. The issues related to Requirements Engineering were in the WER track, while Experimental Software Engineering topics were handled by ESELAW track. All issues related to software production process and contemporary approaches to automation and quality improvement were discussed in the SET Track. For this special section, we selected one best paper from each track, which were extended and reviewed in two rounds. The three papers were refereed by three well-known experts in the field. The selected papers are the described as follows:

• Sergio Miranda, Elder Rodrigues, Marco Tulio Valente, Ricardo Terra in their paper entitled “Architecture Conformance Checking in Dynamically Typed Languages” present an architectural conformance and visualization approach based on static code analysis techniques and on a lightweight type propagation heuristic. The main idea of the paper is to provide the developers’ community with means to control the architectural erosion process by reporting architectural violations and visualizing them in high-level architectural models, such as reflexion models and DSMs. The approach is supported by the ArchRuby tool.
• Christian Quesada-Lopez and Marcelo Jenkins in their paper entitled “Function Point Structure and Applicability: A Replicated Study” report on a family of replications carried out on a subset of the ISBSG R12 dataset to evaluate the structure and applicability of function points. The goal of this replication is to aggregate evidence about internal issues of Function point analysis (FPA) as a metric, and to confirm previous results using a different set of data. The results aggregated evidence and confirmed that some BFCs (Base Functional Component ) of the FPA method are correlated. A prediction model based on transactions or external inputs appear to be as good as a model based on UFP. Simplifying the FPA measurement procedure based on counting a subset of BFCs could improve measurement process efficiency and simplify prediction models while allowing savings in measurement effort, and preserving the accuracy of effort estimates.
• Leandro Antonelli, Gustavo Rossi, and Alejandro Oliveiros in their paper entitled “A Collaborative Approach to Describe the Domain Language through the Language Extended Lexicon” propose an approach to specify a domain specific language (DSL) to capture requirements in a collaborative way using Language Extended Lexicon. Defining a domain specific language to specifying requirements is a way to diminish the level of incompleteness and deal with the possible conflicts that do arise in the requirements context. The authors rely on collaboration to foster the involvement and cooperation of the stakeholders, thus the stakeholders are able to explore the differences constructively and provide a common understanding of the domain language beyond their own limited views.