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

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

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

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,...