05 Fakultät Informatik, Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/6

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Publication Type: search.filters.UBSTyp.ZeitschriftenartikelSubject: search.filters.subject.004Subject: search.filters.subject.620Institute: search.filters.UBSInstitut.Institut für Software Engineering

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    Software product line testing : a systematic literature review
    (2024) Agh, Halimeh; Azamnouri, Aidin; Wagner, Stefan
    A Software Product Line (SPL) is a software development paradigm in which a family of software products shares a set of core assets. Testing has a vital role in both single-system development and SPL development in identifying potential faults by examining the behavior of a product or products, but it is especially challenging in SPL. There have been many research contributions in the SPL testing field; therefore, assessing the current state of research and practice is necessary to understand the progress in testing practices and to identify the gap between required techniques and existing approaches. This paper aims to survey existing research on SPL testing to provide researchers and practitioners with up-to-date evidence and issues that enable further development of the field. To this end, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with seven research questions in which we identified and analyzed 118 studies dating from 2003 to 2022. The results indicate that the literature proposes many techniques for specific aspects (e.g., controlling cost/effort in SPL testing); however, other elements (e.g., regression testing and non-functional testing) still need to be covered by existing research. Furthermore, most approaches are evaluated by only one empirical method, most of which are academic evaluations. This may jeopardize the adoption of approaches in industry. The results of this study can help identify gaps in SPL testing since specific points of SPL Engineering still need to be addressed entirely.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Do RESTful API design rules have an impact on the understandability of Web APIs?
    (2023) Bogner, Justus; Kotstein, Sebastian; Pfaff, Timo
    Context. Web APIs are one of the most used ways to expose application functionality on the Web, and their understandability is important for efficiently using the provided resources. While many API design rules exist, empirical evidence for the effectiveness of most rules is lacking. Objective. We therefore wanted to study 1) the impact of RESTful API design rules on understandability, 2) if rule violations are also perceived as more difficult to understand, and 3) if demographic attributes like REST-related experience have an influence on this. Method. We conducted a controlled Web-based experiment with 105 participants, from both industry and academia and with different levels of experience. Based on a hybrid between a crossover and a between-subjects design, we studied 12 design rules using API snippets in two complementary versions: one that adhered to a rule and one that was a violation of this rule. Participants answered comprehension questions and rated the perceived difficulty. Results. For 11 of the 12 rules, we found that violation performed significantly worse than rule for the comprehension tasks. Regarding the subjective ratings, we found significant differences for 9 of the 12 rules, meaning that most violations were subjectively rated as more difficult to understand. Demographics played no role in the comprehension performance for violation . Conclusions. Our results provide first empirical evidence for the importance of following design rules to improve the understandability of Web APIs, which is important for researchers, practitioners, and educators.