T. Mikkonen

Examining Privacy and Trust Issues at the Edge of Isomorphic IoT Architectures: Case Liquid AI

The growing domain of liquidity in computing extends its boundaries to include advancements like liquid artificial intelligence (AI). Liquid AI leverages liquid software using isomorphic Internet of Things (IoT) architecture to enhance computation at the edge. This innovation unveils vast opportunities yet also introduces significant challenges, particularly around privacy and trust. We explore the vulnerabilities that might hinder the progression of this technological fusion toward achieving trustworthy AI. Through an intensive examination of the literature, this research highlights the heightened threats to data integrity and stakeholder trust in these evolving ecosystems. Four main challenges: Data collection, Data storage and Access, Data utilization and sharing, and Surveillance and profiling were identified and examined under privacy, and two, Algorithms and decision-making and Security of IoT infrastructure under trust. The concerns are further categorized to highlight their impact on the development of trustworthy AI. The study acknowledges the early state of the field. Consequently, this research navigates through the limited available literature, initiating a pioneering discourse emphasizing fostering a foundation for developing secure and trustworthy Liquid AI environments.

Carbon-Aware Governance Gates: An Architecture for Sustainable GenAI Development

The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) in the software development life cycle (SDLC) increases computational demand, which can raise the carbon footprint of development activities. At the same time, organizations are increasingly embedding governance mechanisms into GenAI-assisted development to support trust, transparency, and accountability. However, these governance mechanisms introduce additional computational workloads, including repeated inference, regeneration cycles, and expanded validation pipelines, increasing energy use and the carbon footprint of GenAI-assisted development. This paper proposes Carbon-Aware Governance Gates (CAGG), an architectural extension that embeds carbon budgets, energy provenance, and sustainability-aware validation orchestration into human-AI governance layers. CAGG comprises three components: (i) an Energy and Carbon Provenance Ledger, (ii) a Carbon Budget Manager, and (iii) a Green Validation Orchestrator, operationalized through governance policies and reusable design patterns.

Time for AI (Ethics) Maturity Model Is Now

There appears to be a common agreement that ethical concerns are of high importance when it comes to systems equipped with some sort of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Demands for ethical AI are declared from all directions. As a response, in recent years, public bodies, governments, and universities have rushed in to provide a set of principles to be considered when AI based systems are designed and used. We have learned, however, that high-level principles do not turn easily into actionable advice for practitioners. Hence, also companies are publishing their own ethical guidelines to guide their AI development. This paper argues that AI software is still software and needs to be approached from the software development perspective. The software engineering paradigm has introduced maturity model thinking, which provides a roadmap for companies to improve their performance from the selected viewpoints known as the key capabilities. We want to voice out a call for action for the development of a maturity model for AI software. We wish to discuss whether the focus should be on AI ethics or, more broadly, the quality of an AI system, called a maturity model for the development of AI systems.

Elements of Sustainability for Public Sector Software - Mosaic Enterprise Architecture, Macroservices, and Low-Code

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

Exploring Virtual Reality as an Integrated Development Environment for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) development approaches tend to start from the physical (hardware) perspective, and the software is the final element in the process. However, this approach is unfit for the more software-intensive world that is increasingly iterative, connected, and constantly online. Many constraints prevent the application of iterative, incremental, and agile development methodologies, which now are the norm for many other fields of software. Time-consuming system validation can only start when both hardware and software components are ready, which implies that the software delivery and quality is almost always the final bottleneck in the CPS development and integration. Also organizational issues raise concerns - CPS development teams are nowadays often geographically distributed, which can result in delays in the process, shortcomings, and even mistakes. In this paper, we propose using our envisioned open-source Virtual Reality-based Integrated software Development Environment (VRIDE) for developing the next generation, increasingly software-intensive CPSs in efficient ways.

Containers in Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Towards a Secure DevOps Approach for Cyber-Physical Systems: An Industrial Perspective

With the expansion of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) across critical and regulated industries, systems must be continuously updated to remain resilient. At the same time, they should be extremely secure and safe to operate and use. The DevOps approach caters to business demands of more speed and smartness in production, but it is extremely challenging to implement DevOps due to the complexity of critical CPSs and requirements from regulatory authorities. In this study, expert opinions from 33 European companies expose the gap in the current state of practice on DevOps-oriented continuous development and maintenance. The study contributes to research and practice by identifying a set of needs. Subsequently, the authors propose a novel approach called Secure DevOps and provide several avenues for further research and development in this area. The study shows that, because security is a cross-cutting property in complex CPSs, its proficient management requires system-wide competencies and capabilities across the CPSs development and operation.

Software - A New Open Access Journal on Software Engineering

Software (ISSN: 2674-113X) [...]

Epic-Organized vs. Requirement-Aligned Gherkin: An Empirical Evaluation of LLM-Based Acceptance Criteria Generation

Automated authoring of Gherkin Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria remains a manual bottleneck in requirements engineering. This study investigates whether epic-organized LLM-generated Gherkin produces higher quality and coverage than requirement-aligned generation. We compare our Timeless (an epic-organized LLM pipeline) approach against a naive large language model (LLM) baseline on four requirements documents (107 requirements) from the PURE dataset. Evaluation covers structural metrics, automated requirement coverage via TF-IDF and dense embeddings, and blind expert assessment by four researchers. In our evaluation, the JSON-constrained pipeline produced structurally valid scenarios across all generated outputs, while the zero-shot baseline achieved 99% structural validity. Semantic coverage was comparable to the baseline, with Timeless achieving 94.3% semantic Requirement Coverage Rate compared with 92.9% for the baseline. TF-IDF produced lower coverage scores for the epic-organized output, suggesting that lexical metrics may miss coverage when scenarios paraphrase requirements at a higher level of abstraction. Expert raters prefer the epic-organized strategy on Correctness (4.61 vs 4.14), Executability (4.61 vs 4.07), and Completeness (4.31 vs 3.50). Overall, the results suggest that epic-organized generation can improve perceived Gherkin quality while maintaining comparable semantic coverage, although broader replication is needed before generalizing this finding.

GenAI as an instant, readily available co-developer: redefining software design process for AI native hybrid work

This paper builds on earlier findings to propose a forward-looking vision of GenAI as an instant, readily available co-developer in hybrid software design and revisit documented challenges from an earlier study on hybrid collaboration.