Related papers: Is it Possible to Disregard Obsolete Requirements?…
In the last decade, several studies have explored automated techniques to estimate the effort of agile software development. We perform a close replication and extension of a seminal work proposing the use of Deep Learning for Agile Effort…
Estimation and inference in dynamic discrete choice models often relies on approximation to lower the computational burden of dynamic programming. Unfortunately, the use of approximation can impart substantial bias in estimation and results…
Comparing competing mathematical models of complex natural processes is a shared goal among many branches of science. The Bayesian probabilistic framework offers a principled way to perform model comparison and extract useful metrics for…
Background: This invited paper is the result of an invitation to write a retrospective article on a "TSE most influential paper" as part of the journal's 50th anniversary. Objective: To reflect on the progress of software engineering…
Computer experiments are becoming increasingly important in scientific investigations. In the presence of uncertainty, analysts employ probabilistic sensitivity methods to identify the key-drivers of change in the quantities of interest.…
On-line experimentation (also known as A/B testing) has become an integral part of software development. To timely incorporate user feedback and continuously improve products, many software companies have adopted the culture of agile…
[Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product…
Industrial practitioners now face a bewildering array of possible configurations for effort estimation. How to select the best one for a particular dataset? This paper introduces OIL (short for optimized learning), a novel configuration…
Context: The Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) paradigm and the planning phase of a systematic literature review. Objective: A protocol to do a systematic literature review with detailed information about the processes suggested by…
Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of Requirements Engineering. This work presents the Bayesian network Requisites that predicts whether the requirements specification documents have to be revised. We show how to validate…
It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…
Context. Nowadays there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the effects of experience on Requirements Engineering (RE). There is a widespread idea that experience improves analyst performance. However, there are empirical studies…
Effort estimation models are a fundamental tool in software management, and used as a forecast for resources, constraints and costs associated to software development. For Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, effort estimation is…
It is widely accepted that understanding system requirements is important for software development project success. However, this paper presents two novel challenges to the requirements concept. First, where many plausible approaches to…
In many instances, the application of approximate Bayesian methods is hampered by two practical features: 1) the requirement to project the data down to low-dimensional summary, including the choice of this projection, which ultimately…
To estimate causal effects from observational data, an applied researcher must impose beliefs. The instrumental variables exclusion restriction, for example, represents the belief that the instrument has no direct effect on the outcome of…
Objectives: The aim of this paper is to contrast the retrospective and prospective use of experts beliefs in choosing between survival models in economic evaluations. Methods: The use of experts retrospective (posterior) beliefs is…
The estimation of risk measures recently gained a lot of attention, partly because of the backtesting issues of expected shortfall related to elicitability. In this work we shed a new and fundamental light on optimal estimation procedures…
Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities such as evolving models to add new features and reconciling conflicting design models developed in parallel by different development teams. As model composition…
Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…