4,951 papers · page 128 of 248
For ages we used our ears side by side with our ophthalmic stimuli to gather additional information, leading and supporting us in our visualization. Nowadays numerous software visualization techniques exist that aim to facilitate program comprehension. In this paper we discuss ho…
Program analysis and automated test generation have primarily been used to find correctness bugs. We present complexity testing, a novel automated test generation technique to find performance bugs. Our complexity testing algorithm, which we call WISE (worst-case inputs from symb…
A variety of compilers, static analyses, and testing frameworks rely heavily on path frequency information. Uses for such information range from optimizing transformations to bug finding. Path frequencies are typically obtained through profiling, but that approach is severely res…
The software underpinning today's IT systems needs to adapt dynamically and predictably to rapid changes in system workload, environment and objectives. We describe a software framework that achieves such adaptiveness for IT systems whose components can be modelled as Markov chai…
Adaptation is of utmost importance in systems developed by assembling reusable software services accessed through their public interfaces. This process aims at solving, as automatically as possible, mismatch cases which may be given at the different interoperability levels among …
Differencing tools are highly relevant for a series of software engineering tasks, including analyzing developers' activities, assessing the changeability of software artifacts, and monitoring the maintenance of critical assets such as source clones and vulnerable instructions. T…
Pre/post condition-based specifications are common-place in a variety of software engineering activities that range from requirements through to design and implementation. The fragmented nature of these specifications can hinder validation as it is difficult to understand if the …
Developers frequently integrate complex COTS frameworks and components in software applications. COTS products are often only partially documented, and developers may misuse technologies and introduce integration faults, as witnessed by the many entries in fault repositories. Onc…
Statistical debugging aims to automate the process of isolating bugs by profiling several runs of the program and using statistical analysis to pinpoint the likely causes of failure. In this paper, we investigate the impact of using richer program profiles such as path profiles o…
Automated systems for measurement and analysis are not adopted on a large scale in companies, despite the opportunities they offer. The fear of the ldquobig brotherrdquo and the lack of reports giving insights into the real adoption process and concrete usages in industry are bar…
As a framework evolves, changes in its application programming interface (API) can break client programs that extend the framework. Repairing a client program can be a challenging task because developers need to understand the context surrounding the API change. This paper descri…
Process models capture tasks performed by agents together with their control flow. Building and analyzing such models is important but difficult in certain areas such as safety-critical healthcare processes. Tool-supported techniques are needed to find and correct flaws in such p…
The documentation of API functions typically conveys detailed specifications for the benefit of interested readers. In some cases, however, it also contains usage directives, such as rules or caveats, of which authors of invoking code must be made aware to prevent errors and inef…
Parallelizing existing sequential programs to run efficiently on multicores is hard. The Java 5 package java.util.concurrent (j.u.c.) supports writing concurrent programs: much of the complexity of writing thread-safe and scalable programs is hidden in the library. To use this pa…
Models can help software engineers to reason about design-time decisions before implementing a system. This paper focuses on models that deal with non-functional properties, such as reliability and performance. To build such models, one must rely on numerical estimates of various…
We present a new automated white box fuzzing technique and a tool, BuzzFuzz, that implements this technique. Unlike standard fuzzing techniques, which randomly change parts of the input file with little or no information about the underlying syntactic structure of the file, BuzzF…
Architecture evolution is a key feature of most software systems. There are few tools that help architects plan and execute these evolutionary paths. We demonstrate a tool to enable architects to describe evolution paths, associate properties with elements of the paths, and perfo…
In modern software systems, programs are obtained by dynamically assembling components. This has made it necessary to subject component providers to access-control restrictions. What permissions should be granted to each component? Too few permissions may cause run-time authoriza…
In this paper we address the problem of combining software components with different and possibly incompatible legal licenses to create a software application that does not violate any of these licenses while potentially having its own. We call this problem the license mismatch p…
This paper describes an approach (SPY) to recovering the specification of a software component from the observation of its run-time behavior. It focuses on components that behave as data abstractions. Components are assumed to be black boxes that do not allow any implementation i…