2,847 papers · page 60 of 143
Good software documentation encourages good software engineering, but the meaning of "good" documentation is vaguely defined in the software engineering literature. To clarify this ambiguity, we draw on work from the data and information quality community to propose a framework t…
Smart home devices provide the convenience of remotely control-ling and automating home appliances. The most advanced smart home environments allow developers to write apps to make smart home devices work together to accomplish tasks, e.g., home security and energy conservation. …
Polyglot programming, the use of multiple programming languages during the development process, is common practice in modern software development. This study investigates this practice through a randomized controlled trial conducted under the context of database programming. Part…
The application of code review in a development environment is essential, but this skill is not taught very often in an educational context despite its wide usage. To streamline the teaching process of code review, we propose a browser based "Code Review Serious Game" (CRSG) with…
The selection of third-party libraries is an essential element of virtually any software development project. However, deciding which libraries to choose is a challenging practical problem. Selecting the wrong library can severely impact a software project in terms of cost, time,…
An effective and efficient application of Continuous Integration (CI) and Delivery (CD) requires software projects to follow certain principles and good practices. Configuring such a CI/CD pipeline is challenging and error-prone. Therefore, automated linters have been proposed to…
In this paper, we present the first exploratory study of deprecated Python library APIs to understand the status quo of API deprecation in the realm of Python libraries. Specifically, we aim to comprehend how deprecated library APIs are declared and documented in practice by thei…
Elite developers, who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse profile of contributing activities, and drive the development of open source software (OSS). To advance our understanding and further support the OSS community, I present a fresh approach to…
Developers can use different technologies for different software development tasks in their work. However, when faced with several technologies with comparable functionalities, it can be challenging for developers to select the most appropriate one, as trial and error comparisons…
In Alibaba, we have seen a growing demand for tracing data flow for scenarios such as data leak detection, change governance, and data consistency checking. Static taint analysis is a technique for such problems, and many approaches are proposed for high scalability and precision…
Deep learning (DL) techniques are rapidly developed and have been widely adopted in practice. However, similar to traditional software systems, DL systems also contain bugs, which could cause serious impacts especially in safety-critical domains. Recently, many research approache…
The software development profession suffers from severe gender biases, which could be explicit and implicit. However, SE literature has not systematically explored and evaluated the methods for reducing gender biases, especially for implicit gender biases. This paper reports on a…
Software bots are employed to support developers' activities, serving as conduits between developers and other tools. Due to their focus on task automation, bots have become particularly relevant for Open Source Software (OSS) projects hosted on GitHub. While bots are adopted to …
The 2019 edition of Stack Overflow developer survey highlights that, for the first time, Python outperformed Java in terms of popularity. The gap between Python and Java further widened in the 2020 edition of the survey. Unfortunately, despite the rapid increase in Python's popul…
Higher-order mutation has the potential for improving major drawbacks of traditional first-order mutation, such as by simulating more realistic faults or improving test-optimization techniques. Despite interest in studying promising higher-order mutants, such mutants are difficul…
We present Harvey, an industrial greybox fuzzer for smart contracts, which are programs managing accounts on a blockchain.
Due to the lexical gap between functionality descriptions and user queries, documentation-based API retrieval often produces poor results.Verb phrases and their phrase patterns are essential in both describing API functionalities and interpreting user queries. Thus we hypothesize…
Graphical User Interface (GUI) elements detection is critical for many GUI automation and GUI testing tasks. Acquiring the accurate positions and classes of GUI elements is also the very first step to conduct GUI reverse engineering or perform GUI testing. In this paper, we imple…
Loop invariant generation has long been a challenging problem. Black-box learning has recently emerged as a promising method for inferring loop invariants. However, the performance depends heavily on the quality of collected examples. In many cases, only after tens or even hundre…
Effort-aware Just-in-Time (JIT) defect identification aims at identifying defect-introducing changes just-in-time with limited code inspection effort. Such identification has two benefits compared with traditional module-level defect identification, i.e., identifying defects in a…