Assumptions and their management in software development: A systematic mapping study

Yang, Chen; Liang, Peng; Avgeriou, Paris

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2017.10.003

Cited by 15 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Subjective. Many researchers and practitioners pointed out that whether a piece of information is an assumption or not, is rather subjective [1,4,5,29]. This is the major reason that stakeholders may have a different understanding of the assumption concept.…”

Section: Characteristics Of Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this often does not happen in practice, and stakeholders need to judge whether a piece of information is an assumption or another type of artifact. To assist making this distinction, we further provide six lessons learned based on our previous work on assumptions and their management [4,5,10,29]. These may increase the possibility of classifying something correctly as an assumption but there are no definitive rules for doing so.…”

Section: Distinguishing Assumptions From Other Types Of Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(3) Look at the context and not just the content. In our systematic mapping study [4], we identified many examples of assumptions claimed by the authors of the studies (e.g., "The system will be available during normal working hours" [47]; "There is a subsystem that is responsible for receiving emergency calls and forwarding them to an available Coordinator" [2]; "If thread i holds the lock in read mode, then x cannot be changed by another thread" [48]). We argue that it is difficult to treat such examples as assumptions by only reading these statements.…”

Section: Distinguishing Assumptions From Other Types Of Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(1) AAs are important in both software architecting and the whole software development lifecycle [1,10]. AAs are not only related to requirements or design decisions, but also intertwined with other types of artifacts, such as use cases, components, design models, design patterns, and risks [4,10]; the lifecycle of AAs spans the whole software development lifecycle, instead of only the architecting or design phase [4,10]. (2) Although AAs are related to different types of artifacts, they differ in nature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We further discuss this in Sections 2.3 and 3.4. (3) Most importantly, AAs that are not well managed (e.g., remaining implicit or becoming invalid) could lead to severe issues in software development [4]. One such issue is undesirable consequences, including undesirable variations in product families, unpredictable and/or unacceptable program/system/environment behavior, and increased costs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluation of a process for architectural assumption management in software development

Yang

Liang

Avgeriou

2018

Science of Computer Programming

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Context:Architectural assumption management is critical to the success of software development projects. In this paper, we propose an Architectural Assumption Management (AAM) process, comprised of four AAM activities: Architectural Assumption Making, Description, Evaluation, and Maintenance. Objective: Evaluating the AAM process in architectural assumption management, regarding the ease of understanding and the effort of conducting the AAM process, as well as the effectiveness of using the AAM process to make architectural assumptions explicit and to identify and reduce invalid architectural assumptions. Method: An explanatory study with 88 first-year master students in software engineering, and an exploratory study with five practitioners from five companies. Results: (1) the ease of understanding the AAM process is moderate for first-year master students but easy for practitioners; (2) the effort of conducting the AAM process is moderate for first-year master students; (3) Making and Evaluation took the students more time than Description and Maintenance; (4) the practitioners considered Evaluation as the most time consuming activity; (5) the AAM process can help to make architectural assumptions explicit and to identify and reduce invalid architectural assumptions in projects. The majority of the students and practitioners agreed that Architectural Assumption Evaluation is the most helpful activity for all these three aspects. For other activities, there are different opinions about their helpfulness; and (6) there are various factors identified that can impact the aforementioned results. Being aware of and properly adjusting these factors can facilitate the application of the AAM process in projects. Conclusions: The AAM process aims at systematically managing architectural assumptions in software development. The results of the case studies provide preliminary empirical evidence for the evaluation of the AAM process.

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Section: Characteristics Of Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distinguishing Assumptions From Other Types Of Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Distinguishing Assumptions From Other Types Of Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Evaluation of a process for architectural assumption management in software development

Yang

Liang

Avgeriou

2018

Science of Computer Programming

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Testing software’s changing features with environment-driven abstraction identification

et al. 2022

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ions are significant domain terms that have assisted in requirements elicitation and modeling. To extend the assistance toward requirements validation, we present in this paper an automated approach to identifying the abstractions for supporting requirements-based testing. We select relevant Wikipedia pages to serve as a domain corpus that is independent from any specific software system. We further define five novel patterns based on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and frame our candidate abstractions in the form of pairs for better testability, where the “key” helps locate “what to test”, and the “value” helps guide “how to test it” by feeding in concrete data. We evaluate our approach with six software systems in two application domains: Electronic health records and Web conferencing. The results show that our abstractions are more accurate than those generated by a state-of-the-art technique. While the initial findings indicate our abstractions’ capabilities of revealing bugs and matching the environmental assumptions created manually, we articulate a new way to perform requirements-based testing by focusing on a software system’s changing features. Specifically, we hypothesize that the same feature would behave differently under a pair of opposing environmental conditions and assess our abstractions’ applicability to this new form of feature testing.

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A descriptive study of assumptions in STRIDE security threat modeling

Landuyt

Joosen

2021

Softw Syst Model

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Assumptions and their management in software development: A systematic mapping study

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Cited by 15 publications

References 32 publications

Evaluation of a process for architectural assumption management in software development

Evaluation of a process for architectural assumption management in software development

Testing software’s changing features with environment-driven abstraction identification

A descriptive study of assumptions in STRIDE security threat modeling

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