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Publications

Publications by Ademar Aguiar

2020

The AgilECo Pattern Language: Physical Environment

Authors
Pinho, D; Aguiar, A;

Publication
EuroPLoP '20: European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs 2020, Virtual Event, Germany, 1-4 July, 2020

Abstract
Communication is crucial in agile contexts due to the need for collaboration and the number of different people involved, ranging from developers to users and business people. This communication should be effective to ensure everyone is on the same page; otherwise it can lead to undesired results such as misunderstanding and loss of productivity. As such, there is a need to ensure good communication in agile contexts. This paper presents a pattern language to tackle this issue, alongside with the patterns of a section of the language. The pattern language aims to provide a set of practices that help with recurrent problems and increase the effectiveness of communication. The patterns presented in this paper (Information Radiators, Co-Located Team, Open Space, Informal Communication Space and Cubes) address the issues related with the physical environment surrounding an agile team. © 2020 ACM.

2020

Fundão, Portugal: Using STEM Education to Help Build a New ICT Technopolis

Authors
Aguiar, A; Pereira, S;

Publication
STEM in the Technopolis: The Power of STEM Education in Regional Technology Policy

Abstract
In 2015, to reverse a rise in unemployment, a decline in economic growth and the population aging, the Municipality of Fundão designed the Strategic Plan for Innovation. The plan was thought to attract companies and people to Fundão and to encourage families and younger generations already in Fundão to live and work in their home territory. This would be accomplished by attracting investments and new businesses based on new technologies. The strategy had a significant positive impact on the number of jobs created in the city, its economic growth, and attraction of businesses and population. In effect, the municipality started from scratch and built a new ICT industry cluster to transform the economy for a globalized, digital age, addressing needs in the areas of software development, robotics, and technology-based solutions for traditional sectors. The consortium supporting the plan includes governmental organizations, universities, schools, civic associations, businesses, financial institutions, and innovation centers. After four years, Fundão hosts 14 new companies, including four multinationals. Those companies have created over 500 highly qualified jobs. The municipality also has 70 new startups and over 200 privately funded innovative projects. The training of young students on digital technologies, namely on programming, as well as the reskilling of adults, was an essential first step in the plan’s implementation. This success was recognized with an award from the European Community-and it motivated the extension of the initiative into elementary schools, with the goal of covering all students of the municipality. This chapter examines the case within the lens of technopolis development and it includes interview insights from those involved in Fundão’s sustainability plan. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

2020

Live software inspection and refactoring

Authors
Fernandes, S; Aguiar, A; Restivo, A;

Publication
CEUR Workshop Proceedings

Abstract
With the increasing complexity of software systems, software developers would benefit from instant and continuous guidance about the system they are maintaining and evolving. Despite existing several solutions providing feedback and suggesting improvements, many tools require explicit invocation, leading to developers missing improvement opportunities, such as important refactorings, due to lost of train of thought. Therefore, to address these limitations, we propose an approach where developers receive instant and continuous feedback about their software systems. This guidance would include the detection of code smells and the suggestion of refactorings to improve the system, justified by relevant software quality metrics related to the recommendations. This research aims to improve the experience of developing and maintaining software systems by providing a live environment for continuous inspection and refactoring of software systems, that is informative, responsive, and tactically predictive, and thus helping developers to identify and solve quality problems in a quicker and better way.

2021

A Model to Enable the Reuse of Metadata-Based Frameworks in Adaptive Object Model Architectures

Authors
Guerra, E; Dias, AD; Veras, LGDO; Aguiar, A; Choma, J; Da Silva, TS;

Publication
IEEE ACCESS

Abstract
The Adaptive Object Model (AOM) is an architectural style in which domain entity types are represented as instances that can be changed at runtime. It can be used to achieve higher flexibility in domain classes. Due to AOM entities having a distinct structure, they are not compatible with most popular frameworks, especially those that use reflection and code annotations. To solve such limitations, this study aims to propose a model that enables the reuse of frameworks designed for classic object-oriented domain models in an AOM application. The proposed model uses dynamically-generated adapters for AOM entities that encapsulate them in a class with the format expected by the frameworks. A reference implementation was developed in the Esfinge AOM RoleMapper framework to evaluate the viability of the proposed model. Initially, to evaluate the solution feasibility, a case study was carried out using the Hibernate framework. Further, an experiment was conducted to assess how the participants perceived the framework functionality reuse through the proposed model. The feasibility study revealed that the solution could be applied in a complex setting for the chosen object-relational mapping frame. It raised some difficulties that can be addressed in future studies. In the experiment, the development time did not present a significant difference compared to the competing approach. Despite the considerable learning curve, most participants considered that the proposed approach has more advantages than the alternative. Based on the evaluations, we can conclude that the proposed model can be successfully employed to use AOM entities with frameworks that were not designed for AOM applications. The possibility of reusing existing frameworks can reduce the effort required to adopt an AOM architecture and, consequently, be a facilitator in implementing more flexible and adaptive approaches.

2021

Handling Privacy Preservation in a Software Ecosystem for the Querying and Processing of Deep Sequencing Data

Authors
Rocha, A; Costa, A; Oliveira, MA; Aguiar, A;

Publication
ERCIM NEWS

Abstract
iReceptor Plus will enable researchers around the world to share and analyse huge immunological distributed datasets, from multiple countries, containing sequencing data pertaining to both healthy and sick individuals. Most of the Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire sequencing (AIRR-seq) data is currently stored and curated by individual labs, using a variety of tools and technologies.

2022

Developing Docker and Docker-Compose Specifications: A Developers' Survey

Authors
Reis, D; Piedade, B; Correia, FF; Dias, JP; Aguiar, A;

Publication
IEEE ACCESS

Abstract
Cloud computing and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), supported by technologies such as Docker, have shaped how many software systems are built and deployed. Previous research has identified typical issues for some types of IaC specification but not why they come to be, or they have delved into collaboration aspects but not into technical ones. This work aims to characterize the activities around two particular kinds of IaC specification-Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml files. We seek to know how they can be better supported and therefore study also what approaches and tools practitioners employ. We used an online questionnaire to gather data. The first part of the study reached 68 graduate students from a study program on informatics engineering, and the second one 120 professional software developers. The results show that most of the activities of the process of developing a Dockerfile are perceived as time-consuming, especially when the respondents are beginners with this technology. We also found that solving issues using trial-and-error approaches is very common and that many developers do not use ancillary tools to support the development of Dockerfiles and docker-compose.yml files.

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