This paper summarizes PLEASE 2013, the fourth edition of the PLEASE workshop series. The main goal of PLEASE is to encourage and promote the adoption of Software Product Line Engineering. To this end, we aim at ...

The ability to identify the behavior of people in a home is at the core of Smart Home functionality. Such environments are equipped with sensors that unobtrusively capture information about the occupants. Reasoning mechanisms ...

Despite the benefits offered by smart grids, energy producers, distributors and consumers are increasingly concerned about possible security and privacy threats. These threats typically manifest themselves at runtime ...

In this paper we describe the appraisal method that was developed by Lero (the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre) and Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) to assess software processes within small to medium-sized ...

This article explores how agile practices can reduce three kinds of “distance” — temporal, geographical,and sociocultural — in global software development (GSD). On the basis of two indepth case studies, specific Scrum and ...

The notion of agreement is widely regarded as an essential aspect of the software requirements process, and sometimes as a vital ingredient of a software requirements specification. However, while some form of agreement ...

Many requirements documents are written in natural language (NL). However, with the flexibility of NL comes the risk of introducing unwanted ambiguities in the requirements and misunderstandings between stakeholders. In ...

The concept of usability has evolved in different research communities and the focus of research has varied. During the last couple of years, research has been oriented towards acknowledging more appropriately the social ...