Abstract
User studies are paramount for advancing research in software engineering, particularly when evaluating tools and techniques involving programmers. However, researchers face several barriers when performing them despite the existence of supporting tools. We base our study on a set of tools and researcher-reported barriers identified in prior work on user studies in software engineering. In this work, we study how existing tools and their features cope with previously identified barriers. Moreover, we propose new features for the barriers that lack support. We validated our proposal with 102 researchers, achieving statistically significant positive support for all but one feature. We study the current gap between tools and barriers, using features as the bridge. We show there is a significant lack of support for several barriers, as some have no single tool to support them.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Supporting sustainability through modelling and analysis has become an active area of research in Software Engineering. Therefore, it is important and timely to survey the current state of the art in sustainability in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), one of the most rapidly evolving classes of complex software systems. This work presents the findings of a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) that aims to identify key primary studies reporting on CPS modelling approaches that address sustainability over the last 10 years. Our literature search retrieved 2209 papers, of which 104 primary studies were deemed relevant fora detailed characterisation. These studies were analysed based on nine research questions designed to extract information on sustainability attributes, methods, models/meta-models, metrics, processes, and tools used to improve the sustainability of CPS. These questions also aimed to gather data on domain-specific modelling approaches and relevant application domains. The final results report findings for each of our questions, highlight interesting correlations among them, and identify literature gaps worth investigating in the near future.

Abstract

Abstract
User studies are paramount for advancing science. In particular, the empirical evaluation of programmer-oriented tools is important to validate research ideas and prototypes, as well as production-ready tools. Previous research has collected several tools used by the software engineering and behavioral science communities to design and run studies. In this work, we study tools used in software engineering studies and identify their features. Furthermore, we analyze three behavioral science experiment tools to identify design ideas that might be adapted to programmer user studies. With this work, we present the set of features currently offered by software engineering tools to support researchers in the design and execution of programmer user studies. We also present the characteristics of some tools used in behavioral science experiments to identify design ideas that can be adapted to programmer user studies.