BASE - Biofeedback Augmented Software Engineering
Scope
International
Research Group
coordinator
Synopsis
The BASE project researches software (SW) faults, often known as defect or bugs, in a new interdisciplinary perspective putting together research teams of software reliability, neuroscience, physiological response to understand the brain mechanisms involved in SW error making/discovery and the corresponding autonomic manifestations that can be captured by wearable sensors, in order to identify conditions (and corresponding code lines) that may cause programmers making bugs or bugs escaping to human attention. The main breakthrough of BASE is a Biofeedback Augmented Software Engineering approach having programmers equipped with available wearable sensors (e.g., ECG, PPG, EDA,...) to monitor physiologic reactions to cognitive stress/concentration/attention shift states during code development. The accuracy and precision of wearable devices (expected to be noisy and including reactions to other stimuli) will be enhanced through correlation models derived from co-registration of fMRI/fNIRS/EEG/physiological sensors measurements, aimed at characterizing both the neural network associated to SW error making/discovery and the corresponding autonomic physiological manifestations. BASE will allow radically new features such as 1) online programmer/testers warning on code lines that may have bugs and need a second look, 2) guide the testing effort by taking into account bug prediction models enhanced with biofeedback data, and 3) create individual programmers? profiles that will help define adequate training needs.
Funding
Portuguese Science Foundation
Total budget
€ 239 000.00
Keywords
software faults, software engineering, cognitive neuroscience, brain mapping, bioinformatics, fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, HRV, EDA
Start Date
2018-07-26
Partners
University of Coimbra (CISUC and ICNAS/CIBIT) and Polytechnic of Milan
CISUC budget
€ 239 000.00
End Date
2022-07-26
Publications
2021
C. Amendola and A. Calcagno and R. Re and I. Pirovano and D. Contini and L. Spinelli and J. Duraes and R. Barbosa and P. d. Carvalho and H. Madeira and A. M. Bianchi and A. Torricelli, "Brain Activations during Programming Tasks: TD-NIRS and EEG Study", in European Conferences on Biomedical Optics 2021 (ECBO), 2021
H. Madeira and M. Castelo-Branco and J. Castelhano and I. C. Duarte and I. C. Duarte and J. Duraes, "Reading and Calculation Neural Systems and Their Weighted Adaptive Use for Programming Skills", Neural Plasticity, vol. Volume 2021, no. Article ID 5596145, 2021
H. Hijazi and J. Cruz and J. Castelhano and R. Couceiro and M. Castelo-Branco and P. d. Carvalho and H. Madeira, "iReview: An Intelligent Code Review Evaluation Tool using Biofeedback", in The 32nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2021), 2021
H. Madeira and M. Castelo-Branco and P. d. Carvalho and J. Castelhano and R. Couceiro and H. Hijazi, "Intelligent Biofeedback Augmented Content Comprehension (TellBack)", IEEE Access, vol. 9, 2021
D. Paiva and J. M. Duarte and R. Lima and M. Carvalho and F. Mattiello-Francisco and H. Madeira, "Fault injection platform for affordable verification and validation of CubeSats software", in 10th Latin-American Symposium on Dependable Computing (LADC), 2021
2019
R. Couceiro and G. Duarte and J. Duraes and J. Castelhano and C. Duarte and C. Teixeira and M. Castelo-Branco and P. Carvalho and H. Madeira, "Pupillography as Indicator of Programmers' Mental Effort and Cognitive Overload", in 2019 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2019
R. Couceiro and R. Barbosa and J. Duraes and G. Duarte and J. Castelhano and C. Duarte and C. Teixeira and N. Laranjeiro and J. Medeiros and M. Castelo-Branco and P. d. Carvalho and H. Madeira, "Spotting problematic code lines using nonintrusive programmers’ biofeedback", in 30th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2019), 2019
R. Couceiro and G. Duarte and J. Duraes and J. Castelhano and C. Duarte and C. Teixeira and M. Castelo-Branco and P. d. Carvalho and H. Madeira, "Biofeedback augmented software engineering: monitoring of programmers' mental effort", in ICSE 2019, 2019
J. Medeiros and R. Couceiro and J. Castelhano and G. Duarte and C. Duarte and J. Duraes and H. Madeira and P. Carvalho and C. Teixeira and M. L. Branco, "Software code complexity assessment using EEG features", in 2019 41st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2019