Authors:
Henrique Vignando
;
Viviane R. Furtado
;
Lucas O. Teixeira
and
Edson OliveiraJr
Affiliation:
Informatics Department, State University of Maringá, Maringá - PR, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Experiment, Ontology, Software Product Line.
Abstract:
Given the overall popularity of experimentation in Software Engineering (SE) in the last decades, we observe an increasing research on guidelines and data standards for SE. Practically, experimentation in SE became compulsory for sharing evidence on theories or technologies and provide reliable, reproducible and auditable body of knowledge. Although existing literature is discussing SE experiments documentation and quality, we understand there is a lack of formalization on experimentation concepts, especially for emerging research topics as Software Product Lines (SPL), in which specific experimental elements are essential for planning, conducting and disseminating results. Therefore, we propose an ontology for SPL experiments, named OntoExper-SPL. We designed such ontology based on guidelines found in the literature and an extensive systematic mapping study previously performed by our research group. We believe this ontology might contribute to better document essential elements of
an SPL experiment, thus promoting experiments repetition, replication, and reproducibility. We evaluated OntoExper-SPL using an ontology supporting tool and performing an empirical study. Results shown OntoExper-SPL is feasible for formalizing SPL experimental concepts.
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