4,951 papers · page 76 of 248
Most techniques to detect program errors, such as testing, code reviews, and static program analysis, do not fully verify all possible executions of a program. They leave executions unverified when they do not check certain properties, fail to verify properties, or check properti…
Programming languages can restrict state change by preventing it entirely (immutability) or by restricting which clients may modify state (read-only restrictions). The benefits of immutability and read-only restrictions in software structures have been long-argued by practicing s…
Many software providers operate crash reporting services to automatically collect crashes from millions of customers and file bug reports. Precisely triaging crashes is necessary and important for software providers because the millions of crashes that may be reported every day a…
Interacting with computers is a ubiquitous activity for millions of people. Repetitive or specialized tasks often require creation of small, often one-off, programs. End-users struggle with learning and using the myriad of domain-specific languages (DSLs) to effectively accomplis…
Empirical software engineering has produced a steady stream of evidence-based results concerning the factors that affect important outcomes such as cost, quality, and interval. However, programmers often also have strongly-held a priori opinions about these issues. These opinions…
Model-based mutation analysis is a powerful but expensive testing technique. We tackle its high computation cost by proposing an optimization technique that drastically speeds up the mutant execution process. Central to this approach is the Featured Mutant Model, a modelling fram…
Conventional concolic testing has been used to provide high coverage of paths in statically typed languages. While it has also been applied in the context of JavaScript (JS) programs, we observe that applying concolic testing to dynamically-typed JS programs involves tackling uni…
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are commonly distinguished from functional requirements by differentiating how the system shall do something in contrast to what the system shall do. This distinction is not only prevalent in research, but also influences how requirements are ha…
Concurrency is a requirement for much modern software, but the implementation of multithreaded algorithms comes at the risk of errors such as data races. Programmers can prevent data races by documenting and obeying a locking discipline, which indicates which locks must be held i…
Invariant discovery is one of the central problems in software verification. This paper reports on an approach that addresses this problem in a novel way; it crowdsources logical expressions for likely invariants by turning invariant discovery into a computer game. The game, call…
Although mutation analysis is considered the best way to evaluate the effectiveness of a test suite, hefty computational cost often limits its use. To address this problem, various mutation reduction strategies have been proposed, all seeking to reduce the number of mutants while…
The pull-based development model is an emerging way of contributing to distributed software projects that is gaining enormous popularity within the open source software (OSS) world. Previous work has examined this model by focusing on projects and their owners---we complement it …
Developers use cloud computing platforms to process a large quantity of data in parallel when developing big data analytics. Debugging the massive parallel computations that run in today's data-centers is time consuming and error-prone. To address this challenge, we design a set …
We created detailed profiles of the energy consumed by common operations done on Java List, Map, and Set abstractions. The results show that the alternative data types for these abstractions differ significantly in terms of energy consumption depending on the operations. For exam…
Although white-box regression test prioritization has been well-studied, the more recently introduced black-box prioritization approaches have neither been compared against each other nor against more well-established white-box techniques. We present a comprehensive experimental …
We present two scalable algorithms for identifying program locations that access thread-shared data in concurrent programs. The static algorithm, though simple, and without performing the expensive whole program information flow analysis, is much more efficient, less memory-deman…
We present sandbox mining, a technique to confine an application to resources accessed during automatic testing. Sandbox mining first explores software behavior by means of automatic test generation, and extracts the set of resources accessed during these tests. This set is then …
Symbolic execution is a powerful program analysis technique, but it is difficult to apply to programs built using frameworks such as Swing and Android, because the framework code itself is hard to symbolically execute. The standard solution is to manually create a framework model…
Software effort estimation (SEE) is a crucial step in software development. Effort data missing usually occurs in real-world data collection. Focusing on the missing data problem, existing SEE methods employ the deletion, ignoring, or imputation strategy to address the problem, w…
Creating and running software produces large amounts of raw data about the development process and the customer usage, which can be turned into actionable insight with the help of skilled data scientists. Unfortunately, data scientists with the analytical and software engineering…