2,847 papers · page 123 of 143
Checkpointing and replaying is an attractive technique that has been used widely at the operating/runtime system level to provide fault tolerance. Applying such a technique at the application level can benefit a range of software engineering tasks such as testing of long-running …
Atomicity is a desirable property that safeguards application consistency for service compositions. A service composition exhibiting this property could either complete or cancel itself without any side effects. It is possible to achieve this property for a service composition by…
Studies have shown that programmers frequently seek external information during programming, from source code and documents, as well as from other programmers because much of the information remains in the heads of programmers. Programmers therefore often ask other programmers qu…
An essential tool in object oriented modeling is the specification of cardinalities of associations between classes. In Object Constraint Language (OCL) such constraints are expressed as conditions on the sizes of the collections that correspond to associations. In this paper we …
Model transformation transforms a high level source model into the skeleton of a low level target model, thereafter developers continue to refine and concretize the skeleton. With the changing requirements, the source model will be consequently modified and such modification shou…
A compiler-checked immutability guarantee provides useful documentation, facilitates reasoning, and enables optimizations. This paper presents Immutability Generic Java (IGJ), a novel language extension that expresses immutability without changing Java's syntax by building upon J…
Property specifications concisely describe aspects of what a system is supposed to do. No matter what notation is used to describe them, however, it is difficult to represent these properties correctly, since there are often subtle, but important, details that need to be consider…
Models are increasingly recognized as an effective means for elaborating requirements and exploring designs. For complex systems, model building is far from an easy task. Efforts were therefore recently made to automate parts of this process, notably, by synthesizing behavior mod…
Regression testing is an important but expensive activity, and a great deal of research on regression testing methodologies has been performed. In recent years, much of this research has emphasized empirical studies, including evaluations of the effectiveness and efficiency of re…
Recent advances in static program analysis have made it possible to detect errors in applications that have been thoroughly tested and are in wide-spread use. The ability to find errors that have eluded traditional validation methods is due to the development and combination of s…
Unit test cases are focused and efficient. System tests are effective at exercising complex usage patterns. Differential unit tests (DUT) are a hybrid of unit and system tests. They are generated by carving the system components, while executing a system test case, that influence…
It is usually assumed that the implementation of exception handling can be better modularized by the use of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). However, the trade-offs involved in using AOP with this goal are not well-understood. This paper presents an in-depth study of the adequa…
Repeated changes to a software system can introduce small weaknesses such as unplanned dependencies between different parts of the system. While such problems usually go undetected, their cumulative effect can result in a noticeable decrease in the quality of a system. We present…
We consider the problem if a given program satisfies a specified safety property. Interesting programs have infinite state spaces, with inputs ranging over infinite domains, and for these programs the property checking problem is undecidable. Two broad approaches to property chec…
We present a study of all sources of aliasing in over one million lines of C code, identifying in the process the common patterns of aliasing that arise in practice. We find that aliasing has a great deal of structure in real programs and that just nine programming idioms account…
SQL injection attacks pose a serious threat to the security of Web applications because they can give attackers unrestricted access to databases that contain sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a new, highly automated approach for protecting existing Web applications…
Bitwise operations are commonly used in low-level systems code to access multiple data fields that have been packed into a single word. Program analysis tools that reason about such programs must model the semantics of bitwise operations precisely in order to capture program cont…
Interpolation based automatic abstraction is a powerful and robust technique for the automated analysis of hardware and software systems. Its use has however been limited to control-dominated applications because of a lack of algorithms for computing interpolants for data structu…
When working on a large software system, a programmer typically spends an inordinate amount of time sifting through thousands of artifacts to find just the subset of information needed to complete an assigned task. All too often, before completing the task the programmer must swi…
The change history of a software project contains a rich collection of code changes that record previous development experience. Changes that fix bugs are especially interesting, since they record both the old buggy code and the new fixed code. This paper presents a bug finding a…