BASE - Biofeedback Augmented Software Engineering

Description

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.

Researchers

Funded by

Portuguese Science Foundation

Partners

University of Coimbra (CISUC and ICNAS/CIBIT) and Polytechnic of Milan

Total budget

239 000,00 €

Local budget

239 000,00 €

Keywords

software faults, software engineering, cognitive neuroscience, brain mapping, bioinformatics, fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, HRV, EDA

Start Date

2018-07-26

End Date

2021-07-26