2,847 papers · page 106 of 143
Method purity inference, also known as side-effect analysis, is an important problem. It has many applications including compiler optimization, model checking, memoization of function calls, atomicity, etc. Surprisingly, despite the long history of this problem, we know of no pur…
It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer productivity. However, few empirical studies quantitatively assess refactoring benefits or investigate developers' perception towards these benefits. This paper presents a field study of refactoring be…
Software is commonly built from reusable components that provide desired functionalities. Although component reuse significantly improves software productivity, insecure component usage can lead to security vulnerabilities in client applications. For example, we noticed that wide…
Bug reporting is an uncoordinated process that is often the cause of redundant workload in triaging and fixing bugs due to many duplicated bug reports. Furthermore, quite often, same bugs are repeatedly reported as users or testers are unaware of whether they have been reported f…
In most software projects, resolved bugs are archived for future reference. These bug reports contain valuable information on the reported problem, investigation and resolution. When bug triaging, developers look for how similar problems were resolved in the past. Search over bug…
Pluggable types can help find bugs such as null-pointer dereference or unwanted mutation (or they can prove the absence of such bugs). Unfortunately, pluggable types require annotations, which imposes a burden on programmers.
Architectural tactics are important building blocks of software architecture. Tactics come in many shapes and sizes, describe solutions for addressing specific quality concerns, and are prevalent across high-performance fault-tolerant systems. Once a decision is made to utilize a…
Software developers interact with the development environments they use by issuing commands that execute various programming tools, from source code formatters to build tools. However, developers often only use a small subset of the commands offered by modern development environm…
Rubicon is a verifier for web applications. Specifications are written in an embedded domain-specific language and are checked fully automatically. Rubicon is designed to fit with current practices: its language is based on RSpec, a popular testing framework, and its analysis lev…
The links between the bug reports in an issue-tracking system and the corresponding fixing changes in a version repository are not often recorded by developers. Such linking information is crucial for research in mining software repositories in measuring software defects and main…
The Android OS has emerged as the leading platform for SmartPhone applications. However, because Android applications are compiled from Java source into platform-specific Dalvik bytecode, existing program analysis tools cannot be used to evaluate their behavior. This paper develo…
Parallel programming is hard. The industry leaders hope to convert the hard problem of using parallelism into the easier problem of using a parallel library. Yet, we know little about how programmers adopt these libraries in practice. Without such knowledge, other programmers can…
Test coverage is an important metric of software quality, since it indicates thoroughness of testing. In industry, test coverage is often measured as statement coverage. A fundamental problem of software testing is how to achieve higher statement coverage faster, and it is a diff…
This paper presents SecuriTAS, a tool to engineer adaptive security. It allows software designers to model security concerns together with the requirements of a system. This model is then used at runtime to analyze changes in security concerns and select the best set of security …
Test suites, once created, rarely remain static. Just like the application they are testing, they evolve throughout their lifetime. Test obsolescence is probably the most known reason for test-suite evolution---test cases cease to work because of changes in the code and must be s…
Incorrect program changes including regression bugs, incorrect bug-fixes, incorrect feature updates are pervasive in software. These incorrect program changes affect software quality and are difficult to detect/correct. In this paper, we propose the notion of "change contracts" t…
There has been a great deal of interest in defect prediction: using prediction models trained on historical data to help focus quality-control resources in ongoing development. Since most new projects don't have historical data, there is interest in cross-project prediction: usin…
Software forking---creating a variant product by copying and modifying an existing product---is often considered an ad hoc, low cost alternative to principled product line development. To maintain such forked products, developers often need to port an existing feature or bug-fix …
To create a new variant of an existing project, developers often copy an existing codebase and modify it. This process is called software forking. After forking software, developers often port new features or bug fixes from peer projects. Repertoire analyzes repeated work of cros…
When the Application Programming Interface (API) of a framework or library changes, its clients must be adapted. This change propagation---known as a ripple effect---is a problem that has garnered interest: several approaches have been proposed in the literature to react to these…