4,951 papers · page 69 of 248
Many test case prioritization criteria have been proposed for speeding up fault detection. Among them, similarity-based approaches give priority to the test cases that are the most dissimilar from those already selected. However, the proposed criteria do not scale up to handle th…
With millions of smartphones sold every year, the development of mobile apps has grown substantially. The battery power limitation of mobile devices has push developers and researchers to search for methods to improve the energy efficiency of mobile apps. We propose a multiobject…
The inception of a mobile app often takes form of a mock-up of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), represented as a static image delineating the proper layout and style of GUI widgets that satisfy requirements. Following this initial mock-up, the design artifacts are then handed …
Context: Software defect data has long been used to drive software development process improvement. If security defects (i.e.,vulnerabilities) are discovered and resolved by different software development practices than non-security defects, the knowledge of that distinction coul…
Automated program repair techniques use a buggy program and a partial specification (typically a test suite) to produce a program variant that satisfies the specification. While prior work has studied patch quality [10, 11] and maintainability [2], it has not examined whether aut…
Code smells were defined as symptoms of poor design choices applied by programmers during the development of a software project [2]. They might hinder the comprehensibility and maintainability of software systems [5]. Similarly to some previous work [3, 4, 6, 7] in this paper we …
Code smells, i.e., symptoms of poor design and implementation choices applied by programmers during the development of a software project [2], represent an important factor contributing to technical debt [3]. The research community spent a lot of effort studying the extent to whi…
Empirical validation of software testing studies is increasingly relying on mutants. This practice is motivated by the strong correlation between mutant scores and real fault detection that is reported in the literature. In contrast, our study shows that correlations are the resu…
It is a common practice for client-side web applications to build on various third-party JavaScript libraries. Due to the lack of namespaces in JavaScript, these libraries all share the same global namespace. As a result, one library may inadvertently modify or even delete the AP…
Recent years have seen great progress in automated synthesis techniques that can automatically generate code based on some intent expressed by the programmer, but communicating this intent remains a major challenge. When the expressed intent is coarse-grained (for example, restri…
Software developers often make use of the online forums such as StackOverflow (SO) to learn how to use software libraries and their APIs. However, the code snippets in such a forum often contain undeclared, ambiguous, or largely unqualified external references. Such declaration a…
Event-driven programming frameworks, such as Android, are based on components with asynchronous interfaces. The protocols for interacting with these components can often be described by finite-state machines we dub callback typestates. Callback typestates are akin to classical ty…
Technical debt, defined as the maintenance obligations arising from shortcuts taken during the design, development, and deployment of software systems, has been shown to significantly impact the reliability and long-term evolution of software systems [1], [2]. Although academic r…
Whether software architects should also code is an enduring question. In order to satisfy performance, security, reliability and other quality concerns, architects need to compare and carefully choose a combination of architectural patterns, styles or tactics. Then later in the d…
Reproducibility is the ability of recreating identical binaries under pre-defined build environments. Due to the need of quality assurance and the benefit of better detecting attacks against build environments, the practice of reproducible builds has gained popularity in many ope…
Background: Statistical concepts and techniques are often applied incorrectly, even in mature disciplines such as medicine or psychology. Surprisingly, there are very few works that study statistical problems in software engineering (SE). Aim: Assess the existence of statistical …
The evidence-based software engineering approach advocates the use of scientific evidence by software engineers to support the adoption of software technologies in industrial software development and maintenance projects. Aside from the unavailability of scientific knowledge in i…
This proposal is about a study we recently published in the IEEE Transaction of Software Engineering journal [4].
Permission-induced attacks, i.e., security breaches enabled by permission misuse, are among the most critical and frequent issues threatening the security of Android devices. By ignoring the temporal aspects of an attack during the analysis and enforcement, the state-of-the-art a…
Deprecation is a language feature that allows API producers to mark a feature as obsolete. We aim to gain a deep understanding of the needs of API producers and consumers alike regarding deprecation. To that end, we investigate why API producers deprecate features, whether they r…