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Electronics
Special Issues
Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives
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Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Computer Science & Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 June 2025 | Viewed by 11249

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Łukasz Radliński

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Zolnierska 49, 71-210 Szczecin, Poland
Interests: software engineering; estimation and prediction; software project management; applications of machine mearning; data science; software repository analysis; modelling project tradeoffs; software project risk; software quality; decision support
Dr. Aleksander Jarzębowicz

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdańsk University of Technology, Narutowicza 11/12, 80-233 Gdańsk, Poland
Interests: software engineering; empirical research; requirements engineering; business analysis; software quality; agile software development; software dependability; assurance cases; software defects
Dr. Włodzimierz Wysocki

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Zolnierska 49, 71-210 Szczecin, Poland
Interests: software engineering; software project management; software quality; agile software development; software process simulation; system dynamics; agent models; deep learnig models; software energy effici
Dr. Ireneusz Miciuła

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Sustainable Finance and Capital Markets, Faculty of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Szczecin, 70-453 Szczecin, Poland
Interests: social policy; communication and media; quantitative social research; human-computer interaction; financial economics; microeconomics; international economics information science; information systems (business informatics)
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Software engineering has become the backbone of technological advancements in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. From building intuitive mobile applications to developing complex algorithms and systems, software engineers are at the forefront of innovation. Therefore, staying up-to-date with the latest trends and perspectives is crucial for professionals and businesses. This Special Issue focuses on explaining the status of software engineering, highlighting the key developments and exploring new possibilities. It will explore the latest software engineering trends, challenges, and perspectives.

This Special Issue covers topics related to the general software development process and its detailed phases or activities. It also includes non-process-oriented topics related to automation, tool support, management, data analysis, and decision support. This Special Issue will present theoretical advancements and their applications in practice. Particular attention will be paid to papers highlighting the transformation, evolution and improvement in software engineering methods, tools and applications. This Special Issue also welcomes all results even if they do not follow popular and well-established research paths as we attempt to look for new ideas.

Several types of submissions are welcome: (1) original research papers reporting results from performed experiments, (2) surveys, systematic reviews, and meta-analyses, as well as tertiary studies that aggregate results from individual studies, and (3) experience-based papers considering various practical aspects of applications of methods or tools. All of these types of submissions should reflect and follow a scientific approach necessary for research papers.

Dr. Łukasz Radliński
Dr. Aleksander Jarzębowicz
Dr. Włodzimierz Wysocki
Dr. Ireneusz Miciuła
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • software development
  • requirements specification
  • software analysis
  • software modelling
  • software designing
  • user experience in software development
  • prototyping
  • software development process management
  • human aspects in software engineering
  • software development techniques
  • software verification and validation
  • software implementation
  • software evolution
  • software maintenance
  • automation in software engineering
  • software development process
  • software project management
  • software tradeoffs
  • risk management
  • software estimation
  • software defects
  • software quality
  • cybersecurity
  • software metrics
  • programming techniques
  • languages and paradigms
  • compilers
  • software configuration management
  • analysis of software repositories
  • software tools
  • artificial intelligence in software engineering
  • machine learning in software engineering
  • decision support in software projects
  • software engineering applications
  • embedded software development

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  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

Jump to: Review, Other

24 pages, 343 KiB  
Article
An Automated Framework for Prioritizing Software Requirements
by Behnaz Jamasb, Seyed Raouf Khayami, Reza Akbari and Rahim Taheri
Electronics 2025, 14(6), 1220; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14061220 - 20 Mar 2025
Viewed by 245
Abstract
Requirement Engineering (RE) is a critical phase in software development, integral to the successful execution of projects. The initial stage of RE involves requirement elicitation and analysis, where the prioritization of requirements is critical. Traditional methods of requirement prioritization (RP) are diverse, each [...] Read more.
Requirement Engineering (RE) is a critical phase in software development, integral to the successful execution of projects. The initial stage of RE involves requirement elicitation and analysis, where the prioritization of requirements is critical. Traditional methods of requirement prioritization (RP) are diverse, each presenting unique challenges. In response to the challenges of traditional methods, this paper proposes an entirely automated framework designed to eliminate the disadvantages associated with excessive stakeholder involvement. This innovative framework processes raw natural language inputs directly, applying a three-phase approach to systematically assign priority numbers to each requirement. The first phase preprocesses the input to standardize and prepare the data, the second phase employs advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze and rank the requirements, and the third phase consolidates the results to produce a final prioritized list. The effectiveness of this method was tested using the RALIC (Replacement Access, Library, and ID Card) dataset, a well-known benchmark in the field of requirement engineering. The results confirm that our automated approach not only enhances the efficiency and objectivity of the prioritization process but also scales effectively across diverse and extensive sets of requirements. This framework represents a significant advancement in the field of software development, offering a robust alternative to traditional, subjective methods of requirement prioritization. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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22 pages, 3053 KiB  
Article
Detecting Self-Admitted Technical Debts via Prompt-Based Method in Issue-Tracking Systems
by Jiaojiao Yu, Hao Tian, Ruiheng Li, Qiankun Zuo and Yi Di
Electronics 2024, 13(23), 4700; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13234700 - 28 Nov 2024
Viewed by 697
Abstract
Self-admitted technical debts (SATDs) refer to a solution in software development that selects suboptimal solutions to meet the current requirements and are intentionally introduced and documented by developers. SATDs in issue-tracking systems are a complement to those within source code comments. The effective [...] Read more.
Self-admitted technical debts (SATDs) refer to a solution in software development that selects suboptimal solutions to meet the current requirements and are intentionally introduced and documented by developers. SATDs in issue-tracking systems are a complement to those within source code comments. The effective identification of SATDs is crucial for software quality assurance and maintenance. Current studies focus on whether issue sections contain debt, but overlook specific SATD types. Meanwhile, they lack solutions for the challenge that SATD features are hard to learn due to the scarcity of instances containing SATDs. To address these problems, we propose a novel method, which is a weighted prompt tuning to identify SATDs, called WPTD. Specifically, WPTD employs a weighted prompt tuning to adapt the model with few-shot samples for insufficient training data. Moreover, to improve the performance of the model, WPTD constructs an SATD verbalizer by extracting keywords through mutual information and refining it with prior contextual information. Furthermore, it also improves SATD representation by extracting weights using the chi-square method and integrating them into the text. Finally, to reduce bias, WPTD computes the average score of results as final predicted distributions. We conduct comprehensive experiments on seven projects and the results show that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches. In addition, we summarize the project-specific keywords, which can help developers better understand SATDs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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16 pages, 4910 KiB  
Article
DEAR: DEtecting Ambiguous Requirements as a Way to Develop Skills in Requirement Specifications
by Franklin Parrales-Bravo, Víctor Gómez-Rodríguez, Luis Chiquito-Vera, Iván Rendón-Quijije, Rosangela Caicedo-Quiroz, Elena Tolozano-Benites, Leonel Vasquez-Cevallos and Lorenzo Cevallos-Torres
Electronics 2024, 13(15), 3079; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13153079 - 3 Aug 2024
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1368
Abstract
To improve requirement specification skills, it is vital to detect ambiguous requirements in order to correct them later. Thus, to help software engineering students improve their capacity to identify ambiguous user requirements (requirements that do not use technical words) while providing them with [...] Read more.
To improve requirement specification skills, it is vital to detect ambiguous requirements in order to correct them later. Thus, to help software engineering students improve their capacity to identify ambiguous user requirements (requirements that do not use technical words) while providing them with a valuable and engaging educational experience, the current study proposes a serious game called DEAR. It consists of a didactic exercise in which participants must move different requirements left or right to indicate whether they are ambiguous or unambiguous. To assess the improvement in students’ abilities in requirement specification and perceptions about the training class when using the DEAR game, we conducted an experiment with 62 participants, splitting them into two groups: one that used the DEAR game and the other that underwent a conventional training session. It was found that, during the training sessions, both groups became more adept at identifying unambiguous user requirements, but there was no discernible difference in performance between them. However, the game group expressed a stronger preference for the training session’s engagement and quality, as well as a stronger sense of having learned how to clearly define user requirements. Overall, the experiment shows that the suggested serious game DEAR may be a helpful teaching tool that yields learning outcomes comparable to those of a chalkboard class while encouraging students to identify unambiguous user requirements in an interactive manner. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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20 pages, 698 KiB  
Article
Enhancing Code Readability through Automated Consistent Formatting
by Thomas Kanoutas, Thomas Karanikiotis and Andreas L. Symeonidis
Electronics 2024, 13(11), 2073; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13112073 - 27 May 2024
Viewed by 1836
Abstract
Code readability is critical to software development and has a significant impact on maintenance and collaboration in evolving technology landscapes. With the increasing complexity of projects and the diversity of developers’ coding styles, the need for automated tools to improve code readability has [...] Read more.
Code readability is critical to software development and has a significant impact on maintenance and collaboration in evolving technology landscapes. With the increasing complexity of projects and the diversity of developers’ coding styles, the need for automated tools to improve code readability has become more apparent. This paper presents an innovative automated system designed to improve code readability by modeling and enforcing consistent formatting standards. The approach uses techniques such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and N-gram models, allowing the system to adapt to different coding styles and preferences. The system works autonomously by analyzing code styling within a project, identifying deviations from established standards and providing actionable recommendations for consistent styling. To validate our approach, several evaluations were performed on a large dataset of Java files. The results demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in detecting and correcting formatting errors, identifying a formatting error within the first five predictions more than 90% of the time, while providing the correct fix nearly 96% of the time, regardless of formatting convention or programming language. By offering a solution tailored to the specific needs of different teams, our system represents a significant advance in automated code formatting and readability improvement. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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23 pages, 5447 KiB  
Article
Two-Level Information-Retrieval-Based Model for Bug Localization Based on Bug Reports
by Shatha Alsaedi, Ahmed A. A. Gad-Elrab, Amin Noaman and Fathy Eassa
Electronics 2024, 13(2), 321; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13020321 - 11 Jan 2024
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1907
Abstract
Software bugs are a noteworthy concern for developers and maintainers. When a failure is detected late, it costs more to be fixed. To repair the bug that caused the software failure, the location of the bug must first be known. The process of [...] Read more.
Software bugs are a noteworthy concern for developers and maintainers. When a failure is detected late, it costs more to be fixed. To repair the bug that caused the software failure, the location of the bug must first be known. The process of finding the defective source code elements that led to the failure of the software is called bug localization. Effective approaches for automatically locating bugs using bug reports are highly desirable, as they would reduce bug-fixing time, consequently lowering software maintenance costs. With the increasing size and complexity of software projects, manual bug localization methods have become complex, challenging, and time-consuming tasks, which motivates research on automated bug localization techniques. This paper introduces a novel bug localization model, which works on two levels. The first level localizes the buggy classes using an information retrieval approach and it has two additional sub-phases, namely the class-level feature scoring phase and the class-level final score and ranking phase, which ranks the top buggy classes. The second level localizes the buggy methods inside these classes using an information retrieval approach and it has two sub-phases, which are the method-level feature scoring phase and the method-level final score and ranking phase, which ranks the top buggy methods inside the localized classes. A model is evaluated using an AspectJ dataset, and it can correctly localize and rank more than 350 classes and more than 136 methods. The evaluation results show that the proposed model outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) metrics and the mean average precision (MAP) in class-level bug localization. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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Review

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28 pages, 1601 KiB  
Review
Methods of Improving Software Energy Efficiency: A Systematic Literature Review and the Current State of Applied Methods in Practice
by Włodzimierz Wysocki, Ireneusz Miciuła and Przemysław Plecka
Electronics 2025, 14(7), 1331; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics14071331 - 27 Mar 2025
Viewed by 487
Abstract
Software energy efficiency management is still a serious challenge and provides an opportunity to introduce improvements that will reduce the resources needed for the successful functioning of the Information Technology (IT) world. After all, in the modern era of information society, computers are [...] Read more.
Software energy efficiency management is still a serious challenge and provides an opportunity to introduce improvements that will reduce the resources needed for the successful functioning of the Information Technology (IT) world. After all, in the modern era of information society, computers are a basic work tool. This article presents the current state of application of good practices and methods for reducing energy consumption by software. The aim of the article is to indicate the need to optimize computer devices’ use of electricity in accordance with the concept of sustainable development and to analyze methods for reducing energy consumption. The article discusses the most popular techniques for reducing energy consumption by software, which is of fundamental importance for this type of organization and translates into the costs of services provided, and indirectly affects the future of the world economy. The aim of scientific research carried out in this way is to support decision-makers in the search for energy-saving solutions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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Other

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49 pages, 2549 KiB  
Systematic Review
Systematic Review on Requirements Engineering in Quantum Computing: Insights and Future Directions
by Samuel Sepúlveda, Ania Cravero, Guillermo Fonseca and Leandro Antonelli
Electronics 2024, 13(15), 2989; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13152989 - 29 Jul 2024
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3534
Abstract
Context: Quantum software development is a complex and intricate process that diverges significantly from traditional software development. Quantum computing and quantum software are deeply entangled with quantum mechanics, which introduces a different level of abstraction and a deep dependence on quantum physical properties. [...] Read more.
Context: Quantum software development is a complex and intricate process that diverges significantly from traditional software development. Quantum computing and quantum software are deeply entangled with quantum mechanics, which introduces a different level of abstraction and a deep dependence on quantum physical properties. The classical requirements engineering methods must be adapted to encompass the essential quantum features in this new paradigm. Aim: This study aims to systematically identify and analyze challenges, opportunities, developments, and new lines of research in requirements engineering for quantum computing. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review, including three research questions. This study included 105 papers published from 2017 to 2024. Results: The main results include the identification of problems associated with defining specific requirements for quantum software and hybrid system requirements. In addition, we identified challenges related to the absence of standards for quantum requirements engineering. Finally, we can see the advances in developing programming languages and simulation tools for developing software in hybrid systems. Conclusions: This study presents the challenges and opportunities in quantum computing requirements engineering, emphasizing the need for new methodologies and tools. It proposes a roadmap for future research to develop a standardized framework, contributing to theoretical foundations and practical applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Software Engineering: Status and Perspectives)
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