Università della Svizzera italiana

Software documentation : automation and challenges

Aghajani, Emad ; Lanza, Michele (Dir.) ; Bavota, Gabriele (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2020 ; 2020INFO014.

Despite the undeniable practical benefits of documentation during software development and evolution activities, its creation and maintenance is often neglected, leading to inadequate and even inexistent documentation. Thus, it is not unusual for developers to deal with unfamiliar code they have difficulties in comprehending. Browsing the official documentation, or accessing online resources,...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Opinion mining for software development

Lin, Bin ; Bavota, Gabriele (Dir.) ; Lanza, Michele (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2020 ; 2020INFO010.

Opinion mining, which uses computational methods to extract opinions and sentiments from natural language texts, can be applied to various software engineering (SE) tasks. For example, developers can mine user feedback from mobile app reviews to understand how to improve their products, and software team leaders can assess developers' mood and emotions by mining communication logs or commit...

Università della Svizzera italiana

Software redundancy : what, where, how

Mattavelli, Andrea ; Pezzè, Mauro (Dir.) ; Carzaniga, Antonio (Codir.)

Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2016 ; 2016INFO007.

Software systems have become pervasive in everyday life and are the core component of many crucial activities. An inadequate level of reliability may determine the commercial failure of a software product. Still, despite the commitment and the rigorous verification processes employed by developers, software is deployed with faults. To increase the reliability of software systems, researchers...

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

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

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,...