4,951 papers · page 65 of 248
Programmers who are blind use a screen reader to speak source code one word at a time, as though the code were text. For example, "float f = 5.23;" can be read as "float f equals five point two three semicolon". This process of reading is in stark contrast to sighted programmers,…
The Linux kernel provides its services to the application layer using so-called system calls. All system calls combined form the Application Programming Interface (API) of the kernel. Hence, system calls provide us with a window into the development process and design decisions t…
Reactive Programming is a style of programming that provides developers with a set of abstractions that facilitate event handling and stream processing. Traditional debug tools lack support for Reactive Programming, leading developers to fallback to the most rudimentary debug too…
Studying developers' behavior is crucial for designing effective techniques and tools to support developers' daily work. However, there are two challenges in collecting and analyzing developers' behavior data. First, instrumenting many software tools commonly used in real work se…
This paper presents an extended abstract incorporated as a journal-first paper into the ICSE'18 program.
Developers often run tests to check that their latest changes to a code repository did not break any previously working functionality. Ideally, any new test failures would indicate regressions caused by the latest changes. However, some test failures may not be due to the latest …
Debugging is an inevitable activity in most software projects, often difficult and more time-consuming than expected, giving it the nickname the "dirty little secret of computer science." Surprisingly, we have little knowledge on how software engineers debug software problems in …
This study presents MAHAKIL, a novel and efficient synthetic over-sampling approach for software defect datasets that is based on the chromosomal theory of inheritance. Exploiting this theory, MAHAKIL interprets two distinct sub-classes as parents and generates a new instance tha…
Despite recent advances, software verification remains challenging. To solve hard verification tasks, we need to leverage not just one but several different verifiers employing different technologies. To this end, we need to exchange information between verifiers. Conditional mod…
Automatic correction of programs is a challenging problem with numerous real world applications in security, verification, and education. One application that is becoming increasingly important is the correction of student submissions in online courses for providing feedback. Mos…
Testing is an integral part of the software development lifecycle, approached with varying degrees of rigor by different process models. Agile process models recommend Test Driven Development (TDD) as a key practice for reducing costs and improving code quality. The objective of …
Building and maintaining modern software systems requires developers to perform a variety of tasks that span various tools and information sources. The crosscutting nature of these development tasks requires developers to maintain complex mental models and forces them (a) to manu…
The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers' emotions by mining crowd-generated content within software repositories and information sources. With a few notable exceptions [1][5], empirical software engineering studies have exploited off-t…
Software systems are increasingly expected to cope with variable workloads, component failures and other uncertainties through self-adaptation. As such, self-adaptive software has been the subject of intense research over the past decade [3, 4, 9, 10].
Database-centric systems strongly rely on SQL queries to manage and manipulate their data. These SQL commands can range from very simple selections to queries that involve several tables, sub-queries, and grouping operations. And, as with any important piece of code, developers s…
We present a technique to automatically generate search heuristics for concolic testing. A key challenge in concolic testing is how to effectively explore the program's execution paths to achieve high code coverage in a limited time budget. Concolic testing employs a search heuri…
Performance problems widely exist in modern software systems. Existing performance optimization techniques, including profiling-based and pattern-based techniques, usually fail to consider the architectural impacts among methods that easily slow down the overall system performanc…
A GUI skeleton is the starting point for implementing a UI design image. To obtain a GUI skeleton from a UI design image, developers have to visually understand UI elements and their spatial layout in the image, and then translate this understanding into proper GUI components and…
Certificate validation in Secure Socket Layer or Transport Layer Security protocol (SSL/TLS) is critical to Internet security. Thus, it is significant to check whether certificate validation in SSL/TLS is correctly implemented. With this motivation, we propose a novel differentia…
In recent years, several automated GUI testing techniques for Android apps have been proposed. These tools have been shown to be effective in achieving good test coverage and in finding bugs without human intervention. Being automated, these tools typically run for a long time (s…