CAPIRS: COVID-19-Based Application Programming Interface Recommendation System for the Developers

Context: From the past few years, Application Programming Interface (API) is widely used for mobile- and web-based application developments. Software developers can integrate third-party services into their projects to achieve their development goals efficiently using APIs;however, with the rapid increase in the number of APIs, the manual selection of Mashup-oriented API is becoming more difficult for the developer. Objective: In the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone wants an update about the latest Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and the latest information on COVID-19. Additionally, a software developer wants to develop an application that provides the SOPs and latest information of COVID-19;a developer can add these functionalities into an application using COVID-19-based APIs. Moreover, the current work aims at proposing a COVID-19-based API recommendation system for the developers. Method: In this study, we propose a COVID-19-based API recommendation system for developers. The recommendation system takes a developer query as input and recommends top-3 APIs and supported features, which help the developer during software development. Furthermore, the proposed COVID-19-based API recommendation system ensures the maximum participation of the developers by validating the recommended APIs and recommendation system from the expert developers using research questionnaires. Results: Additionally, the proposed COVID-19-based API recommendation system's output is validated by expert developers and evaluated on 120 expert developers' queries. In addition, experiment results show that single value decomposition achieves better prediction. Conclusion: We conclude that it is significantly important to recommend APIs along with supported features to the developer for project development, and future work is needed to take more developer's queries also to build Integrated Development Environment for the developers. © 2022 World Scientific Publishing Co.

A Tacit-Knowledge based Requirements Elicitation Model Supporting COVID-19 Context

Effective software requirements elicitation plays a vital role in the success or failure of a project. However, ambiguity in the requirement’s statements indicate the presence of a tacit knowledge, which ultimately act as a root cause of critical complications in later stages of software development as user’s needs might remain hidden. Additionally, the existence of numerous stakeholders escalates the problem as their perceptions may contrast mainly due to their experiences and roles in a specific application domain. Hence, witlessness of relevant stakeholder(s) and ambiguous requirements cause the compromise for a product quality. Eventually, it paves the way towards the failure of a project. Furthermore, COVID-19 has affected all walks of life, more specifically requirements elicitation process as it heavily depends on human-to-human interaction. Motivated by this, current study aims at identifying the requirements elicitation techniques and challenges through a systematic literature review protocol. Furthermore, we have performed an exploratory study to identify the traditional elicitation techniques that can be used specifically for eliciting the tacit requirements. Additionally, we validate the top 15 critical challenges in a normal and pandemic scenario. To validate the result’s authenticity and legitimacy, appropriate statistical tests have been applied on the obtained results. Based on the attained results, it is observed that transfer of tacit knowledge remains a most crucial challenge. To effectively handle the tacit knowledge challenge, we propose a novel conceptual model supporting COVID-19 context. Similarly, we employ expert-validation mechanism for empirically evaluation of the proposed conceptual model. Moreover, the current study provides the guidelines for the practitioners to mitigate the highlighted effects on the requirements elicitation process during current pandemic time. Finally, we believe that proposed conceptual model supports the practitioners in effectively gathering the tacit-knowledge based requirements in the COVID-19 context. Author

A Pilot Study on Online-Education Supportive Tools in COVID-19 Context

Excessive proliferation of COVID-19-posed negative impacts on many sectors, especially the education sector. As a result, educational institutions around the world are closed;thus, online learning seems to be an optimal way to bridge the communication gap between students and teachers. Online-learning tools provide an effective way to continue the learning process in a COVID-19 context. However, finding the best tool that meets most of the online-learning requirements remains a challenging task. Additionally, it is essential to identify and respond to the underlying concerns of students and teachers in an online-learning environment. Motivated by this, current work provides a comparative analysis of existing learning tools grounded on the set of features mentioned in the literature. Moreover, we conduct a pilot study on students and teachers of various universities (taking online classes) of south-east Asia region. The conducted study reveals that some new features need to be accommodated to improve online teaching. Finally, we propose a set of recommendations to further enhance the online-learning environment.