4,951 papers · page 61 of 248
Platforms like Stack Overflow and GitHub's gist system promote the sharing of ideas and programming techniques via the distribution of code snippets designed to illustrate particular tasks. Python, a popular and fast-growing programming language, sees heavy use on both sites, wit…
Java is a safe programming language by providing bytecode verification and enforcing memory protection. For instance, programmers cannot directly access the memory but have to use object references. Yet, the Java runtime provides an Unsafe API as a backdoor for the developers to …
Data structures permeate many aspects of software engineering, but their associated human cognitive processes are not thoroughly understood. We leverage medical imaging and insights from the psychological notion of spatial ability to decode the neural representations of several f…
Diversity, including gender diversity, is valued by many software development organizations, yet the field remains dominated by men. One reason for this lack of diversity is gender bias. In this paper, we study the effects of that bias by using an existing framework derived from …
The utility of a smartphone is limited by its battery capacity and the ability of its hardware and software to efficiently use the device's battery. To properly characterize the energy consumption of an app and identify energy defects, it is critical that apps are properly tested…
Many modern applications require low-latency processing of large data sets, often by using approximate algorithms that trade accuracy of the results for faster execution or reduced memory consumption. Although the algorithms provide probabilistic accuracy and performance guarante…
Configurable software systems provide a multitude of configuration options to adjust and optimize their functional and non-functional properties. For instance, to find the fastest configuration for a given setting, a brute-force strategy measures the performance of all configurat…
Quality assurance automation is essential in modern software development. In practice, this automation is supported by a multitude of tools that fit different needs and require developers to make decisions about which tool to choose in a given context. Data and analytics of the p…
Type migration is a refactoring activity in which an existing type is replaced with another one throughout the source code. Manually performing type migration is tedious as programmers need to find all instances of the type to be migrated, along with its dependencies that propaga…
Streaming APIs are becoming more pervasive in mainstream Object-Oriented programming languages. For example, the Stream API introduced in Java 8 allows for functional-like, MapReduce-style operations in processing both finite and infinite data structures. However, using this API …
This paper proposes Mimic, an automated UI compatibility testing system for Android apps. Mimic is designed specifically for comparing the UI behavior of an app across different devices, different Android versions, and different app versions. This design choice stems from a commo…
Deep Learning (DL) systems are rapidly being adopted in safety and security critical domains, urgently calling for ways to test their correctness and robustness. Testing of DL systems has traditionally relied on manual collection and labelling of data. Recently, a number of cover…
A well-known approach to statically analyze libraries without having access to their client code is to model all possible clients abstractly using a most-general client. In dynamic languages, however, a most-general client would be too general: it may interact with the library in…
Embedded systems, like those found in the automotive domain, must comply with stringent functional and non-functional requirements. To fulfil these requirements, engineers are confronted with a plethora of design alternatives both at the software and hardware level, out of which …
Current state-of-the-art automatic software repair (ASR) techniques rely heavily on incomplete specifications, or test suites, to generate repairs. This, however, may cause ASR tools to generate repairs that are incorrect and hard to generalize. To assess patch correctness, resea…
Source code summarization -- creating natural language descriptions of source code behavior -- is a rapidly-growing research topic with applications to automatic documentation generation, program comprehension, and software maintenance. Traditional techniques relied on heuristics…
Background: While FLOSS projects espouse openness and acceptance for all, in practice, female contributors often face discriminatory barriers to contribution. Aims: In this paper, we examine the extent to which these problems still exist. We also study male and female contributor…
Developers rely on software logs for a wide variety of tasks, such as debugging, testing, program comprehension, verification, and performance analysis. Despite the importance of logs, prior studies show that there is no industrial standard on how to write logging statements. Rec…
Automated build systems are routinely used by software engineers to minimize the number of objects that need to be recompiled after incremental changes to the source files of a project. In order to achieve efficient and correct builds, developers must provide the build tools with…
Cloning is a simple way to create new variants of a system. While cheap at first, it increases maintenance cost in the long term. Eventually, the cloned variants need to be integrated into a configurable platform. Such an integration is challenging: it involves merging the usual …