4,951 papers · page 56 of 248
Developer turnover is inevitable on software projects and leads to knowledge loss, a reduction in productivity, and an increase in defects. Mitigation strategies to deal with turnover tend to disrupt and increase workloads for developers. In this work, we suggest that through cod…
Traceability is a fundamental component of the modern software development process that helps to ensure properly functioning, secure programs. Due to the high cost of manually establishing trace links, researchers have developed automated approaches that draw relationships betwee…
Smart contracts are Turing-complete programs that execute on the infrastructure of the blockchain, which often manage valuable digital assets. Solidity is one of the most popular programming languages for writing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform. Like traditional programs…
Misleading names of the methods in a project or the APIs in a software library confuse developers about program functionality and API usages, leading to API misuses and defects. In this paper, we introduce MNire, a machine learning approach to check the consistency between the na…
Detecting regression bugs in software evolution, analyzing side-channels in programs and evaluating robustness in deep neural networks (DNNs) can all be seen as instances of differential software analysis, where the goal is to generate diverging executions of program paths. Two e…
Open source is ubiquitous and many projects act as critical infrastructure, yet funding and sustaining the whole ecosystem is challenging. While there are many different funding models for open source and concerted efforts through foundations, donation platforms like PayPal, Patr…
Software developers use a mix of source code and natural language text to communicate with each other: Stack Overflow and Developer mailing lists abound with this mixed text. Tagging this mixed text is essential for making progress on two seminal software engineering problems ---…
As deep neural networks are increasingly being deployed in practice, their efficiency has become an important issue. While there are compression techniques for reducing the network's size, energy consumption and computational requirement, they only demonstrate empirically that th…
Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness) can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic impact. Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and methodological support throughout the development life cycle.…
Existing intrusive test automation techniques for touch screen applications (e.g., Appium and Sikuli) are difficult to work on many closed or uncommon systems, such as a GoPro. Being non-intrusive can largely extend the application scope of the test automation techniques. To this…
Defects in infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts can have serious consequences, for example, creating large-scale system outages. A taxonomy of IaC defects can be useful for understanding the nature of defects, and identifying activities needed to fix and prevent defects in IaC sc…
Many data-driven software engineering tasks such as discovering programming patterns, mining API specifications, etc., perform source code analysis over control flow graphs (CFGs) at scale. Analyzing millions of CFGs can be expensive and performance of the analysis heavily depend…
Property-based testing is a popular approach for validating the logic of a program. An effective property-based test quickly generates many diverse valid test inputs and runs them through a parameterized test driver. However, when the test driver requires strict validity constrai…
API usage directives in official API documentation describe the contracts, constraints and guidelines for using APIs in natural language. Through the investigation of API misuse scenarios on Stack Overflow, we identify three barriers that hinder the understanding of the API usage…
Modern static analyzers often need to simultaneously check a few dozen or even hundreds of value-flow properties, causing serious scalability issues when high precision is required. A major factor to this deficiency, as we observe, is that the core static analysis engine is obliv…
Online chatting is gaining popularity and plays an increasingly significant role in software development. When discussing functionalities, developers might reveal their desired features to other developers. Automated mining techniques towards retrieving feature requests from mass…
Bottom-up program analysis has been traditionally easy to parallelize because functions without caller-callee relations can be analyzed independently. However, such function-level parallelism is significantly limited by the calling dependence - functions with caller-callee relati…
Once a programmer knows one language, they can leverage concepts and knowledge already learned, and easily pick up another programming language. But is that always the case? To understand if programmers have difficulty learning additional programming languages, we conductedan emp…
Puppet is a popular computer system configuration management tool. By providing abstractions that model system resources it allows administrators to set up computer systems in a reliable, predictable, and documented fashion. Its use suffers from two potential pitfalls. First, if …
In contemporary code review, the comments put by reviewers on a specific code change are immediately visible to the other reviewers involved. Could this visibility prime new reviewers' attention (due to the human's proneness to availability bias), thus biasing the code review out…