machine learning

What leads developers towards the choice of a JavaScript framework?

A model of factors that are desirable to be found in a JSF and a representation of the decision makers involved in the frameworks selection is offered, which contributes to the body of knowledge related to the decision-making process when selecting aJSF.

Time for AI (Ethics) Maturity Model Is Now

It is argued that AI software is still software and needs to be approached from the software development perspective, and whether the focus should be on AI ethics or the quality of an AI system, called a maturity model for the development of AI systems is discussed.

Implementing AI Ethics in a Software Engineering Project-Based Learning Environment - The Case of WIMMA Lab

Key Challenges in Software Startups Across Life Cycle Stages

It is found that what perceived as biggest challenges by software startups do vary across different life cycle stages, even though its significance decreases when the learning focuses of the startups move from problem to solution and their products mature.

Minimum Viable Product or Multiple Facet Product? The Role of MVP in Software Startups

Minimum viable product (MVP) is the main focus of both business and product development activities in software startups. We empirically explored five early stage software startups to understand how MVP are used in early stages. Data was collected from interviews, observation and documents. We looked at the MVP usage from two angles, software prototyping and boundary spanning theory. We found that roles of MVPs in startups were not fully aware by entrepreneurs. Besides supporting validated learning, MVPs are used to facilitate product design, to bridge communication gaps and to facilitate cost-effective product development activities. Entrepreneurs should consider a systematic approach to fully explore the value of MVP, as a multiple facet product (MFP). The work also implies several research directions about prototyping practices and patterns in software startups.

“Failures” to be celebrated: an analysis of major pivots of software startups

This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.

What Influences the Speed of Prototyping? An Empirical Investigation of Twenty Software Startups

This study conducts a multiple case study on twenty European software startups and proposes a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups, and identifies factors that occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in earlystage software startups.

An Empirical Study on Female Participation in Software Project Courses

Gender issues in software engineering education are gaining research attention due to the desire to promote female participation in the field. The objective of this work is to enhance the understanding of female students' participation in software engineering projects to support gender-aware course optimization. Since 2015, we have investigated the participation of female students in terms of software engineering activities and team dynamics in a software project course that involves a real customer. We found that female students are more active with project management and requirement engineering, while they remain under-represented in highly complex or specific tasks, i.e. architecture work, and user experience design. We found no statistically significant difference in perceived team dynamics between male and female students. Insights on female project activities would facilitate the arrangement of project teams so that learning can be distributed equally across genders

StartCards - A method for early-stage software startups

The first published version of StartCards is presented, which is considered useful for early-stage startups and can also be used as a pedagogical tool in startup education.

VAPU: System for Autonomous Legacy Code Modernization

In this study, we present a solution for the modernization of legacy applications, an area of code generation where LLM-based multi-agent systems are proving essential for complex multi-phased tasks. Legacy applications often contain deprecated components that create compatibility, security, and reliability risks, but high resource costs make companies hesitate to update. We take a step forward to integrate an LLM-based multi-agent system as part of a legacy web application update to provide a cost-effective solution to update legacy applications autonomously. We propose a multi-agent system named a Verifying Agent Pipeline Updater (VAPU), which is designed to update code files in phases while simulating different roles in a software development team. In our previous study, we evaluated the system for legacy version updates by using six legacy web application view files by resulting errors and accomplished requirements. This study extends the previous evaluation of a multi-agent pipeline system by extending the evaluation of VAPU from a single LLM to five LLMs and using the temperature parameter in both 0 to 1 settings. Additionally, we tested the system with 20 open-source Python GitHub projects. The results of the evaluation were compared to Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and One-Shot Learning (OSL) prompts. The extended evaluation of VAPU showed that particularly in a low-temperature VAPU can get similar level of error count compared to the ZSL/OSL prompts but with a higher level of fulfilled requirements, depending on the LLM. VAPU showed up to 22.5% increase in the succeeding Python file update requirements compared to ZSL/OSL prompts. The study indicates that an LLM-based multi-agent system is a capable solution to update components of a legacy application autonomously.

Autonomous Legacy Web Application Upgrades Using a Multi-Agent System

An LLM-based multi-agent system that autonomously upgrades legacy web applications to the latest versions and maintains context across tasks and agents, improving solution quality over the base model in some cases is proposed.

Context Before Code: An Experience Report on Vibe Coding in Practice

An experience report from a small full-stack team that applied contextual prompting and explicit architectural constraints to build a multi-project agent learning platform designed for sustained, production-oriented use and an academic retrieval-augmented generation system is presented.