Rodrigo Morales

Concordia University Montreal · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering

We face a new software crisis. In 1968, computer scientists learned that developing robust software requires skills, methods, and tools. Today, software and hardware engineers realize that developing a robust Internet of Things (IoT) also pushes the states of their art and practice. Recent news illustrate the many problems faced by IoT: from lack o...

Software engineering is vital for IoT systems to design systems that are secure, interoperable, modifiable, and scalable. However, industry and academia are still working on many crucial questions related to software engineering for IoT systems, for example, regarding the best practices for developing IoT systems, how to select the hardware, commun...

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the correction of anti-patterns, which are “poor” solutions to recurring design problems. However, little quantitative...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical, connected devices providing services through private networks and the Internet. The devices connect through the Internet to Web servers and other devices. One of the popular programming languages for communicating Web pages and Web apps is JavaScript (JS). Hence, the devices would benefit from...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical, heterogeneous, connected devices providing services through private networks and the Internet. It connects a range of new devices to the Internet so they can communicate with Web servers and other devices around the world. Today's standard platform for communicating Web pages and Web apps is Ja...

The paper "Getting the Most from Map Data Structures in Android" has been presented at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA. The presentation itself was on November 7 as part of the conference’s combined research and journal-...

A map is a data structure that is commonly used to store data as key--value pairs and retrieve data as keys, values, or key--value pairs. Although Java offers different map implementation classes, Android SDK offers other implementations supposed to be more efficient than HashMap: ArrayMap and SparseArray variants (SparseArray, LongSparseArray, Spa...

Refactoring is a maintenance activity that aims to improve design quality while preserving the behavior of a system. Several (semi)automated approaches have been proposed to support developers in this maintenance activity, based on the correction of anti-patterns, which are "poor solutions" to recurring design problems. However, little quantitative...

Anti-patterns are poor solutions to design problems that make software systems hard to understand and to extend. Components involved in anti-patterns are reported to be consistently related to high changes and faults rates. Developers are advised to perform refactoring to remove anti-patterns, and consequently improve software design quality and re...

Ouni et al. “Maintainability defects detection and correction: a multi-objective approach” proposed a search-based approach for generating optimal refactoring sequences. They estimated the size of the search space for the refactoring scheduling problem using a formulation that is incorrect; the search space is estimated to be too much larger than i...

With millions of smartphones sold every year, the development of mobile apps has grown substantially. The battery power limitation of mobile devices has push developers and researchers to search for methods to improve the energy efficiency of mobile apps. We propose a multiobjective refactoring approach to automatically improve the architecture of...

Software maintenance cost is estimated to be more than 70% of the total cost of system, because of many factors, including new user’s requirements, the adoption of new technologies and the quality of software systems. From these factors, quality is the one that we can control and continually improved to prevent degradation of performance and reduct...

The energy consumption of mobile apps is a trending topic and researchers are actively investigating the role of coding practices on energy consumption. Recent studies suggest that design choices can conflict with energy consumption. Therefore, it is important to take into account energy consumption when evolving the design of a mobile app. In this...

The boom in mobile apps has changed the traditional landscape of software development by introducing new challenges due to the limited resources of mobile devices, e.g., memory, CPU, network bandwidth and battery. The energy consumption of mobile apps is nowadays a hot topic and researchers are actively investigating the role of coding practices on...

Anti-patterns are poor solutions to design problems that make software systems hard to understand and extend. Entities involved in anti-patterns are reported to be consistently related to high change and fault rates. Refactorings, which are behavior preserving changes are often performed to remove anti-patterns from software systems. Developers are...

Anti-patterns are poor design choices that hinder code evolution, and understandability. Practitioners perform refactoring, that are semantic-preserving-code transformations, to correct anti-patterns and to improve design quality. However, manual refactoring is a consuming task and a heavy burden for developers who have to struggle to complete thei...

Code review is the process of having other team members examine changes to a software system in order to evaluate its technical content and quality. A lightweight variant of this practice, often referred to as Modern Code Review (MCR), is widely adopted by software organizations today. Previous studies have established a relation between the practi...

One of the biggest concerns in software maintenance is design quality; poor design hinders software maintenance and evolution. One way to improve design quality is to detect and correct anti-patterns (i.e., poor solutions to design and implementation problems), for example through refactorings. There are several approaches to detect anti-patterns,...