4,951 papers · page 122 of 248
Recent versions of the Java standard library offer flexible locking constructs that go beyond the language's built-in monitor locks in terms of features, and that can be fine-tuned to suit specific application scenarios. Under certain conditions, the use of these constructs can i…
An increasingly important class of software-based systems is platforms that permit integration of third-party components, services, and tools. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is one such platform that has been successful in providing integration and distribution in the busine…
The patch contribution process (PCP) is very important to the sustainability of OSS projects. Nevertheless, there are several issues on patch contribution in mature OSS projects, which include time consuming process, lost and ignored patches, slow review process. These issues are…
Feature models describe the common and variable characteristics of a product line. Their advantages are well recognized in product line methods. Unfortunately, creating a feature model for an existing project is time-consuming and requires substantial effort from a modeler.
Concurrency bugs, particularly data races, are notoriously difficult to debug and are a significant source of unreliability in multithreaded applications. Many tools to catch data races rely on program instrumentation to obtain memory instruction traces. Unfortunately, this instr…
A plethora of recent work leverages historical data to help practitioners better prioritize their software quality assurance efforts. However, the adoption of this prior work in practice remains low. In our work, we identify a set of challenges that need to be addressed to make p…
Developers use tools to develop software systems and always alleged better tools are being produced and purchased. Still there have been only limited studies on how people really use tools; these studies have used limited data, and the interactions between tools have not been pro…
A process model, namely a formal definition of the coordination of agents performing activities using resources and artifacts, can aid understanding of the real-world process it models. Moreover, analysis of the model can suggest improvements to the real-world process. Complex re…
Security experts use their knowledge to attempt attacks on an application in an exploratory and opportunistic way in a process known as penetration testing. However, building security into a product is the responsibility of the whole team, not just the security experts who are of…
Despite the emerging ubiquity of hardware monitoring mechanisms and prior research work in other fields, the applicability and usefulness of hardware monitoring mechanisms have not been fully scrutinized for software engineering.
A raw object is partially initialized, with only some fields set to legal values. It may violate its object invariants, such as that a given field is non-null. Programs often manipulate partially-initialized objects, but they must do so with care. Furthermore, analyses must be aw…
One approach to easing program comprehension is to reduce the amount of code that a developer has to read. Describing the high level abstract algorithmic actions associated with code fragments using succinct natural language phrases potentially enables a newcomer to focus on fewe…
In previous decades, researchers have explored the formal foundations of program testing. By exploring the foundations of testing largely separate from any specific method of testing, these researchers provided a general discussion of the testing process, including the goals, the…
In software testing, the test oracle determines if the application under test has performed an execution correctly. In current testing practice and research, significant effort and thought is placed on selecting test inputs, with the selection of test oracles largely neglected. H…
Role objects are a widely recognized design pattern for representing objects that expose different properties in different contexts. By developing a tool that automatically refactors legacy code towards this pattern and by applying this tool to several programs, we have found not…
Software product line engineering provides efficient means to develop variable software. To support program comprehension of software product lines (SPLs), we developed View Infinity, a tool that provides seamless and semantic zooming of different abstraction layers of an SPL. Fi…
Mashups are becoming increasingly popular as end users are able to easily access, manipulate, and compose data from many web sources. We have observed, however, that mashups tend to suffer from deficiencies that propagate as mashups are reused. To address these deficiencies, we w…
Quality improvement is the key to enormous cost reduction in the IT business. However, improvement projects often fail in practice. In many cases, stakeholders fearing, e.g., a loss of power or not recognizing the benefits inhibit the improvement. Systematic change management and…
This paper briefly describes the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering in Healthcare, held at the 2011 International Conference on Software Engineering.
Requirements traceability is an important undertaking as part of ensuring the quality of software in the early stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. This paper demonstrates the applicability of swarm intelligence to the requirements tracing problem using pheromone commun…