Blockchain is considered as a major emerging technology that is having an ever‐increasing spread both in industrial and academic contexts. As the usage of blockchain keeps increasing, a fourth generation of blockchain platforms is being proposed. Thus, applications of blockchain have evolved towards wider scopes than cryptocurrency and asset management. In this context, it is important for practitioners

A smart contract (SC) is a programme stored in the Ethereum blockchain by a contract‐creation transaction. SC developers deploy an instance of the SC and attempt to execute it in exchange for a fee, paid in Ethereum coins (Ether). If the computation needed for their execution turns out to be larger than the effort proposed by the developer (i.e., the gasLimit), their client instantiation will not be

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Mutation testing is a fault‐based technique to test the quality of test suites by inducing artificial syntactic faults or mutants in a source program. However, some mutants have the same semantics as original program and cannot be detected by any test suite input known as equivalent mutants. Equivalent mutant problem (EMP) is undecidable as it requires manual human effort to identify a mutant as equivalent

Software Outsourcing Partnership (SOP) is considered as a kind of risk and reward sharing client‐vendor relationship. Generally, a fruitful outsourcing association might be converted to an outsourcing partnership. The objective of this research is to identify and analyse barriers that are hurdles to vendors in renewing or promoting their ongoing client‐vendor relationship to outsourcing partnership

Cross‐project defect prediction (CPDP) is needed when the target projects are new projects or the projects have less training data, since these projects do not have sufficient historical data to build high‐quality prediction models. The researchers have proposed many CPDP methods, and previous studies have conducted extensive comparisons on the performance of different CPDP methods. However, to the

Development and operations (DevOps) practices significantly accelerate and automate the continuous delivery and deployment of software systems. However, adopting DevOps concepts is not a straightforward job. Most organizations are not able to keep pace with the rhythm of continuous delivery and deployment, which are key DevOps attributes. Despite the significance of DevOps programs, it is still unknown

Global software development (GSD) has become a rising software development model in the last few years. Although much research has been performed in terms of GSD management, GSD governance research is scarce at the present time and presents multiple challenges that need to be addressed. In this paper, a systematic mapping study has been conducted, the aim of which was to discover the main issues dealt

Missing data is a serious issue in software engineering because it can lead to information loss and bias in data analysis. Several imputation techniques have been proposed to deal with both numerical and categorical missing data. However, most of those techniques used is simple reuse techniques originally designed for numerical data, which is a problem when the missing data are related to categorical

Bug assignment is the task of ranking candidate developers in terms of their potential competence to fix a bug report. Numerous methods have been developed to address this task, relying on different methodological assumptions and demonstrating their effectiveness with a variety of empirical studies with numerous data sets and evaluation criteria. Despite the importance of the subject and the attention

Transactions have been used in many software sizing methods to measure software functional size and provide a basis for effort estimation. To further investigate the effects that transactions have on software functional size and more accurately estimate project effort using the transactional information, in this paper, we propose a method to identify transactions, as well as their complexity attributes

Software development is a complex task, and the introduction of multi‐site development teams spread across the globe makes it even harder. Requirement changes during the software development process are inevitable, and failing to manage evolving requirements is one of the contributors to project failures. Requirements change management (RCM) becomes difficult in global software development (GSD) projects

Software testing is an important and costly software engineering activity in the industry. Despite the efforts of the software testing research community in the last several decades, various studies show that still many practitioners in the industry report challenges in their software testing tasks.

Majority of software development firms are adopting the concepts of global software development (GSD) in order to develop high‐quality and low‐cost products. However, the requirements change management (RCM) becomes a significant challenge in the GSD environment because of the unavailability of proper RCM framework and taxonomy. The objective of this study is to develop a taxonomy of the challenging

Software requirement engineering (SRE) is the initial stage of the software engineering process and entails several challenges relating to the identification, implementation, evolution, and management of requirements for the development of software systems that meet the desired functionality quality standards. Agile software development (ASD) is a well‐known software development process that follows

In recent years, due to significant evolution in adopting new technologies and development methodologies in the field of software engineering, the developers and researchers are striving to optimize the accuracy of software effort estimation (SEE). The overestimation and underestimation both are the key challenges for software progress; hence, there is a continuous need for an accurate SEE. This paper

Software process improvement (SPI) initiatives have contributed for a long time to the progress of software development. However, the outcome of such initiatives has not always been as effective as expected. The literature of SPI points out that motivation of practitioners involved in SPI initiatives is a critical factor for its success. On the other hand, gamification has been perceived as motivational

Model‐based test case generation techniques provide a mechanism to derive tests systematically. This study provides a systematic mapping of test case generation techniques based on UML interaction diagrams. The study compares the test case generation techniques regarding their capabilities and limitations, and it also assesses the reporting quality of the primary studies. We can conclude that the studies

With the agile approach to managing software development projects comes an increased dependability on well‐functioning teams, since many of the practices are built on teamwork. The objective of this study was to investigate if, and how, team development from a group psychological perspective is related to some work practices of agile teams. Data were collected from 34 agile teams (200 individuals)

Requirements Change Management (RCM) is one of the challenges faced by Global Software Development (GSD) organisations as requirements evolution is inevitable due to dynamic business and operating environments. GSD organisations face issues when dealing with RCM because many organisations embark on GSD without understanding their readiness to undertake such an initiative. Currently, there is no readiness

Some free, open-source software projects have been around for quite a long time, the longest living ones dating from the early 1980s. For some of them, detailed information about their evolution is available in source code management systems tracking all their code changes for periods of more than 15 years. This paper examines in detail the evolution of one of such projects, glibc, with the main aim