Università della Svizzera italiana

Reification as the key to augmenting software development : an object is worth a thousand words

Dal Sasso, Tommaso ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2018 ; 2018INFO014.

Software development has become more and more pervasive, with influence in almost every human activity. To be able to fit in so many different scenarios and constantly implement new features, software developers adopted methodologies with tight development cycles, sometimes with more than one release per day. With the constant growth of modern software projects and the consequent expansion...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Interaction-aware development environments : recording, mining, and leveraging IDE interactions to analyze and support the development flow

Minelli, Roberto ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.) ; Mocci, Andrea (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2017 ; 2017INFO013.

Nowadays, software development is largely carried out using Integrated Development Environments, or IDEs. An IDE is a collection of tools and facilities to support the most diverse software engineering activities, such as writing code, debugging, and program understanding. The fact that they are integrated enables developers to find all the tools needed for the development in the same place....

Università della Svizzera italiana

Holistic recommender systems for software engineering

Ponzanelli, Luca ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.) ; Mocci, Andrea (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2017 ; 2017INFO005.

The knowledge possessed by developers is often not sufficient to overcome a programming problem. Short of talking to teammates, when available, developers often gather additional knowledge from development artifacts (e.g., project documentation), as well as online resources. The web has become an essential component in the modern developer’s daily life, providing a plethora of information ...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Mining unstructured software data

Bacchelli, Alberto ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2013 ; 2013INFO003.

Our thesis is that the analysis of unstructured data supports software understanding and evolution analysis, and complements the data mined from structured sources. To this aim, we implemented the necessary toolset and investigated methods for exploring, exposing, and exploiting unstructured data.To validate our thesis, we focused on development email data. We found two main challenges in...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Object-focused environments revisited

Olivero, Fernando ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2013 ; 2013INFO001.

In the object oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, programs are composed solely of objects. The computational model is based on a world of collaborating objects, where they send each other messages to carry out tasks. The programs are crafted with the aid of tools, which enable to describe their components and behavior in a human readable form. With the advent of the graphical user interface...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Change-centric improvement of team collaboration

Hattori, Lile Palma ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2012 ; 2012INFO002.

In software development, teamwork is essential to the successful delivery of a final product. The software industry has historically built software utilizing development teams that share the workplace. Process models, tools, and methodologies have been enhanced to support the development of software in a collocated setting. However, since the dawn of the 21st century, this scenario has begun...

Università della Svizzera italiana

On the evolution of source code and software defects

D'Ambros, Marco ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO007.

Software systems are subject to continuous changes to adapt to new and changing requirements.This phenomenon, known as software evolution, leads in the long term to software aging: The size and the complexity of systems increase, while their quality decreases. In this context, it is no wonder that software maintenance claims the most part of a software system's cost.The analysis of software...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Software systems as cities

Wettel, Richard ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2010 ; 2010INFO005.

Software understanding takes up a large share of the total cost of a software system. The high costs attributed to software understanding activities are caused by the size and complexity of software systems, by the continuous evolution that these systems are subject to, and by the lack of physical presence which makes software intangible. Reverse engineering helps practitioners deal with the...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Reverse engineering software ecosystems

Lungu, Mircea F. ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009 ; 2009INFO006.

Reverse engineering is an active area of research concerned with the development of techniques and tools that support the understanding of software systems. All the techniques that were pro- posed until now study individual systems in isolation. However, software systems are seldom developed in isolation; instead, they are developed together with other projects in the wider context of an...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Of change and software

Robbes, Romain ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2008 ; 2008INFO004.

Software changes. Any long-lived software system has maintenance costs dominating its initial development costs as it is adapted to new or changing requirements. Systems on which such continuous changes are performed inevitably decay, making each maintenance task harder. This problem is not new: The software evolution research community has been tackling it for more than two decades. However,...