4,951 papers · page 55 of 248
Understanding the root cause of a defect is critical to isolating and repairing buggy behavior. We present Causal Testing, a new method of root-cause analysis that relies on the theory of counterfactual causality to identify a set of executions that likely hold key causal informa…
Statistical language modeling techniques have successfully been applied to large source code corpora, yielding a variety of new software development tools, such as tools for code suggestion, improving readability, and API migration. A major issue with these techniques is that cod…
In object-oriented languages, constructors often have a combination of required and optional formal parameters. It is tedious and inconvenient for programmers to write a constructor by hand for each combination. The multitude of constructors is error-prone for clients, and client…
Metamodels play a significant role to describe and analyze the relations between domain concepts. They are also cornerstone to build a software language (SL) for a domain and its associated tooling. Metamodel definition generally drives code generation of a core API. The latter i…
The sheer complexity of web applications leaves open a large attack surface of business logic. Particularly, in some scenarios, developers have to expose a portion of the logic to the client-side in order to coordinate multiple parties (e.g. merchants, client users, and third-par…
When a program fails to process an input, it need not be the program code that is at fault. It can also be that the input data is faulty, for instance as result of data corruption. To get the data processed, one then has to debug the input data---that is, (1) identify which parts…
Software engineering involves writing new code or editing existing code. Recent efforts have investigated the neural processes associated with reading and comprehending code --- however, we lack a thorough understanding of the human cognitive processes underlying code writing. Wh…
During regression testing, developers rely on the pass or fail outcomes of tests to check whether changes broke existing functionality. Thus, flaky tests, which nondeterministically pass or fail on the same code, are problematic because they provide misleading signals during regr…
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become ubiquitous in software development. However, external APIs are not guaranteed to contain every desirable feature, nor are they immune to software defects. Therefore, API users will sometimes be faced with situations where a cu…
Heterogeneous computing with field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) has demonstrated orders of magnitude improvement in computing efficiency for many applications. However, the use of such platforms so far is limited to a small subset of programmers with specialized hardware know…
Automated Program Repair (APR) is very useful in helping developers in the process of software development and maintenance. Despite recent advances in deep learning (DL), the DL-based APR approaches still have limitations in learning bug-fixing code changes and the context of the…
Data-driven defect prediction has become increasingly important in software engineering process. Since it is not uncommon that data from a software project is insufficient for training a reliable defect prediction model, transfer learning that borrows data/konwledge from other pr…
Highly-configurable software systems can have thousands of interdependent configuration options across different subsystems. In the resulting configuration space, discovering a valid product configuration for some selected options can be complex and error prone. The configuration…
Research has established the wide variety of security failures in mobile apps, their consequences, and how app developers introduce or exacerbate them. What is not well known is why developers do so---what is the rationale underpinning the decisions they make which eventually str…
The number of vulnerabilities increases rapidly in recent years, due to advances in vulnerability discovery solutions. It enables a thorough analysis on the vulnerability distribution and provides support for correlation analysis and prediction of vulnerabilities. Previous resear…
Rust is a promising systems programming language that embraces both high-level memory safety and low-level resource manipulation. However, the dark side of Rust, unsafe Rust, leaves a large security hole as it bypasses the Rust type system in order to support low-level operations…
Software projects are increasingly forming social-technical ecosystems within which individual projects rely on the infrastructures or functional components provided by other projects, leading to complex inter-dependencies. Through inter-project dependencies, a bug in an upstream…
Grey-box fuzzing is an evolutionary process, which maintains and evolves a population of test cases with the help of a fitness function. Fitness functions used by current grey-box fuzzers are not informative in that they cannot distinguish different program executions as long as …
Successful cross-language clone detection could enable researchers and developers to create robust language migration tools, facilitate learning additional programming languages once one is mastered, and promote reuse of code snippets over a broader codebase. However, identifying…
Black-box testing has been extensively applied to test models of Cyber-Physical systems (CPS) since these models are not often amenable to static and symbolic testing and verification. Black-box testing, however, requires to execute the model under test for a large number of cand…