LEOTTA M.

Gamification aims to enhance motivation for a variety of routine tasks by incorporating game elements, such as scoring. In educational settings, students are often the players, and gamification can create a more engaging learning environment that motivates them to achieve academic success. In this paper, we describe an experimental software...

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been relevant in all economic sectors. Job loss and decrease in hiring are among the most severe immediate financial impact of Covid-19, while lower economic growth will be the long-term effect. To get a better understanding of what happened, in this work, we have studied the trends of the job market...

Software testing is a crucial part of business success to ensure final product quality. However, little concrete data exists on technical demands about it in the industry, mostly collected through personal opinion surveys on a restricted sample of professionals. In this paper, we used a different approach: we applied content analysis to a set...

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on many economic sectors. The most severe immediate financial effects of Covid-19 include job losses and decreased hiring, and we can expect generalized lower economic growth in the long term. While such phenomena are there for all to see, measuring their scope is complex. In this work, we...

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Modern web applications require long quality assurance sessions to be appreciated by users. Test automation reduces delivery times but requires the development of effective and maintainable test scripts so that the advantages of its use are not lost. The usage of the Page object (PO) pattern has proven to be very effective in GUI testing,...

When modellers have to describe a business process, they can decide to rely on one of the several notations currently available such as for instance BPMN or UML. However, it is not easy to select the most appropriate one. Indeed, even though in the literature several comparisons among notations have been proposed, often they focus on specific...

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Tests, when not correctly implemented, can pass on incorrect system implementations rather than fail. In this case, they are named silent horrors or false-negative tests. They make releasing low-quality (buggy) versions of the software system more probable. Furthermore, faithfully implementing test specifications is crucial when they play the...

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Automated web testing is an appealing option, especially when continuous testing practices are adopted. However, web test cases are known to be fragile and to break easily when a web application evolves. The Page Object (PO) design pattern addresses such problem by providing a layer of indirection that decouples test cases from the internals of...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are complex and multifaceted, and the design of their architectures needs to consider many aspects at a time. Design decisions concern, for instance, the modeling of software components and their interconnections, as well as where to deploy the components within the available hardware infrastructure in the...

Automated end-to-end (E2E) Web testing relying on frameworks such as Selenium Web Driver is commonly used to assess the quality of web applications. However, the resulting test scripts may require long execution times, due to their interaction with the browser GUI and backend services. To avoid repeated and costly setup of the Web application...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming ubiquitous, and their spread has had a significant impact on all aspects of society. Software is a key aspect of IoT systems, from firmware to cloud infrastructures. For this reason, Software Engineering (SE) is crucial to design, develop, deploy, and maintain high-quality IoT systems. Despite the...

In software engineering, observability is the ability to determine the current state of a software system based on its external outputs or signals such as metrics, logs, or traces. Web engineers rely on the web browser console as the primary tool to monitor the client-side of web applications during end-to-end tests. However, this is a manual...

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The recent technological advancements has pointed the interest of developers, researchers, and end-users towards the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, whose plethora of services naturally arises to improve the human life. As the IoT becomes more and more involved in our everyday activities, we are personally encouraged to experiment it in...

Automated daily living activity recognition is a relevant task since it allows to assess the health status of a subject both objectively and remotely. Having a reliable measure is important since it gives precise indications to doctors and researchers interested in evaluating the effectiveness of treatments or drugs (e.g., in the context of...

Mutation testing is an important technique able to evaluate the bug-detection effectiveness of existing software test suites. Mutation testing tools exist for several languages, e.g., Java and JavaScript, but no solutions are available for managing the mutation testing process for entire web applications, in the context of end-to-end (E2E) web...

By ensuring adequate functional coverage, End-to-End (E2E) testing is a key enabling factor of continuous integration. This is even more true for web applications, where automated E2E testing is the only way to exercise the full stack used to create a modern application. The test code used for web testing usually relies on DOM locators, often...

In the last years, Machine Learning (ML) has become extremely used in software systems: it is applied in many different contexts such as medicine, bioinformatics, finance, automotive, only to mention a few. One of the main drawbacks recognized in the literature is that there are still no consolidated approaches and strategies to ensure the...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming ubiquitous and assuring their quality is of paramount importance, especially in safety-critical contexts. Unfortunately, few quality assurance proposals are present in the literature. In this paper, we propose an approach for semi-automated model-based generation of executable test cases, oriented...

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are rapidly gaining importance in the human society, providing a variety of services to improve the quality of our lives, involving complex and safety-critical tasks; therefore, assuring their quality is of paramount importance. Node-RED is a Web-based visual tool inspired by the flow-based programming paradigm,...

In the last few years, Internet of Things (IoT) systems have drastically increased their relevance in many fundamental sectors. For this reason, assuring their quality is of paramount importance, especially in safety-critical contexts. Unfortunately, few quality assurance proposals for assuring the quality of these complex systems are present...