Replication Package

Would you like to replicate our study? This page will take you through the steps to replicate our study. We use the methodology to guide you through the replication process. We understand that some steps are hard or even impossible to replicate, thus we provide artifacts (protocols, scripts, spreadsheets with results) generated during our study to help you follow along. Please, contact us in case you have any doubts.

Before you start, click here to download the replication package as a .zip

We followed design science to synthesize the guidelines. We guide you through each cycle of the design science process from Fig 1.

Figure 1: Activities to synthesizing guidelines according to design science

First Cycle: Survey Elicitation and Terminology

The first cycle is devoted to establishing awareness of the state-of-the-art and building the terminology used in the study.

We elicit important surveys in runtime verification and field-based testing:

From the surveys, we extracted the following terminology. We present it in the format of a search string since the terminology intended to be used in a systematic literature review (in Cycle 2): 

Search String = ( ros OR ”robotic operating system” ) AND ( ”runtime verification” OR ”runtime assurance” OR ”online assurance” OR ”online verification” OR ”runtime monitoring” OR ”runtime testing” OR ”online testing” OR ”on-line testing” OR ”field-based testing” OR ”field testing” OR ”in-vivo testing”

The terminology was validated internally, through peer reviews and discussions with co-authors to consolidate the scope of our study.

Second Cycle: Literature Review, Guideline Templates, External Validation

The Second Cycle focused on performing a literature review, synthesizing the guideline templates, and performing an external validation of the template.

Systematic Literature Review

We used the search string to perform a systematic literature review to understand the studies discussing runtime verification and field-based testing for ROS applications. The SLR followed the activities in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: Activities to conducting the systematic literature review

We present precise descriptions for each activity in a protocol

In short, we searched for the string in IEEEXplore, ACM Digital Library, and Scopus.

Then, we used the inclusion and exclusion criteria from Tab. 1 to filter out relevant studies

ID Description Reasoning
IC_1 ROS-based application. Including ROS1 and ROS2. Robotic Operating System (ROS) is a must
IC_2 Explicit description (or reference to peer-reviewed venue) Papers that do not explicitely describe the employed technique may lead to ambiguous interpretation.
EC_1 Tutorial, artifact, short paper (less than 5pgs), keynote, Such papers do not provide enough contextual information
EC_2 Verification, validation, or testing techniques that Papers targeting V&V of non-ROS applications should be excluded.
EC_3 Verification, validation, or testing techniques that Papers targeting V&V of hardware should be excluded

Table 1: Inclusion Criterion (IC) and Exclusion Criterion (EC)

Finally, we selected the runtime verification and field-based testing approaches according to a classification scheme. The classified approached are detailed in a spreadsheet

Guidelines Template

Then, we understood what was necessary for a guideline and designed a template, see Tab. 2. We used the template to synthesize our initial set of guideline sketches.
Element Description
ID Identifier used to facilitate tracing guidelines between groups
Title Title summarizes an action that practitioners should follow to mitigate or avoid a recurring problem.
Context (WHEN) The Context is a paragraph placing the guideline among a known set of conditions. This paragraph should delimit the scope in which the guideline is applicable. It should also introduce the conceptual terminology used in the guideline, which is defined by the conditions under which the guideline is valid.
Reason (WHY) Reason introduces the recurring problem faced by practitioners. It intends to leverage the relevance of the guideline to practitioners
Suggestion (WHAT) Suggestion is a sentence or two introducing WHAT should the practitioners do to mitigate the recurring problem
Process (HOW) Process is a paragraph that carefully guides the practitioners through HOW they can practice the guideline. In this paragraph, there should be references to tools that may help, concrete examples, or references to precise explanations of researchers or practitioners who have done something similar.
Exemplars Exemplars are concrete descriptions of papers/artifacts that follow the guidelines. An exemplar can be generic such as an artifact or rather specific such as a model problem in testing ROS-based systems in the field.
Strengths Strengths is a list of benefits that the practitioners should consider when applying the guideline
Weaknesses Weaknesses is a list of technological/theoretical barriers that may slow the actual implementation of the guideline, either by undesired side-effects or scenarios in which applying the guideline might not lead to the desired effect.

Table 2: Template for Guideline Specification

External validation

Finally, we shared, through a questionnaire, the sketches with members of the Robotics Software Engineering Workshop. Three experts sent us their feedback.

Third Cycle: Repos mining, Guidelines with Exemplars, Online Survey

The third cycle was devoted to consolidating the guidelines with concrete examples, clustering, organizing the guidelines, and validating with researchers and practitioners.

Consolidating the Guidelines

To consolidate the guidelines we further looked for specific papers on the topic of the guideline and performed a data mining. For the specific search, we used Google Scholar with terms extracted from the guideline sketches. The repositories mining followed the procedure described in Fig. 3.

Figure 3: Data mining activities

For more details, check the github repository with scripts and the protocol with details explaining the steps in Fig. 3.

This step resulted in the guidelines catalog. Each guideline follows a template and they are all documented in a separate guidelines.pdf file.

Online Survey

Finally, we validated the final set of guidelines with practitioners and researchers. To this end, we designed and distributed an online questionnaire.

The questionnaire was split in two targeting developers or quality assurance teams.

The results from the third cycle confirmed the guidelines' relevance and helped us fine-tune them. The analysis that followed up the questionnaires is available in the Validation section.