4,951 papers · page 126 of 248
We identify three challenges related to the provenance of the material we use in teaching software engineering. We suggest that these challenges can be addressed by using evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) and its primary tool of systematic literature reviews (SLRs). This…
A reachability question is a search across feasible paths through a program for target statements matching search criteria. In three separate studies, we found that reachability questions are common and often time consuming to answer. In the first study, we observed 13 developers…
Concurrency bugs are notoriously difficult to detect because there can be vast combinations of interleavings among concurrent threads, yet only a small fraction can reveal them. Atomic-set serializability characterizes a wide range of concurrency bugs, including data races and at…
Over 30 years ago, the preprocessor cpp was developed to extend the programming language C by lightweight metaprogramming capabilities. Despite its error-proneness and low abstraction level, the preprocessor is still widely used in present-day software projects to implement varia…
Many software projects fail because they overlook stakeholders or involve the wrong representatives of significant groups. Unfortunately, existing methods in stakeholder analysis are likely to omit stakeholders, and consider all stakeholders as equally influential. To identify an…
LISE is a multidisciplinary project involving lawyers and computer scientists with the aim to put forward a set of methods and tools to (1) define software liability in a precise and unambiguous way and (2) establish such liability in case of incident. This paper provides an over…
Many computations exhibit a trade off between execution time and quality of service. A video encoder, for example, can often encode frames more quickly if it is given the freedom to produce slightly lower quality video. A developer attempting to optimize such computations must na…
Statistical debugging uses lightweight instrumentation and statistical models to identify program behaviors that are strongly predictive of failure. However, most software is mostly correct; nearly all monitored behaviors are poor predictors of failure. We propose an adaptive mon…
Previous research confirms the existence of recurring bug fixes in software systems. Analyzing such fixes manually, we found that a large percentage of them occurs in code peers, the classes/methods having the similar roles in the systems, such as providing similar functions and/…
We describe twinning and its applications to adapting programs to alternative APIs. Twinning is a simple technique that allows programmers to specify a class of program changes, in the form of a mapping, without modifying the target program directly. Using twinning, programmers c…
Today's software projects are often distributed across multiple locations. This distribution poses new challenges produced by the cooperation across different countries, times zones, and cultures. Software engineering courses have to prepare students accordingly. This paper repor…
Though verification tools are finding industrial use, the utility of engineering optimizations that make them scalable and usable is not widely known. Despite the fact that several optimizations are part of folklore in the communities that develop these tools, no rigorous evaluat…
This paper discusses results achieved in measuring complexity, effectiveness and efficiency, in a series of related software course projects, spanning a period of seven years. We focus on how the complexity of those projects was measured, and how the success of the students in ef…
Concurrency fault are difficult to find because they usually occur under specific thread interleavings. Fault-detection tools in this area find data-access patterns among thread interleavings, but they report benign patterns as well as actual faulty patterns. Traditional fault-lo…
Free and open source software systems (FOSS) are distributed and made available to users under different software licenses, mentioned in FOSS code by means of licensing statements. Various factors, such as changes in the legal landscape, commercial code licensed as FOSS, or code …
Many software artifacts are created, maintained and evolved as part of a software development project. As software developers work on a project, they interact with existing project artifacts, performing such activities as reading previously filed bug reports in search of duplicat…
Many modern software systems are designed to be highly configurable, which increases flexibility but can make programs hard to test, analyze, and understand. We present an initial empirical study of how configuration options affect program behavior. We conjecture that, at certain…
Despite the flourishing of languages to describe software architectures, existing Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) are still far away from what it is actually needed. In fact, while they support a traditional perception of a Software Architecture (SA) as a set of constit…
Reproducing bug symptoms is a prerequisite for performing automatic bug diagnosis. Do bugs have characteristics that ease or hinder automatic bug diagnosis? In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of several key characteristics of bugs that affect reproducibility at …
This paper describes a formal experiment carried out to investigate the effect of the Personality factor conscientiousness on the effectiveness of Pair Programming as a pedagogical tool in higher Education. This experiment took place at the University of Auckland, using as subjec…