4,951 papers · page 81 of 248
Common wisdom in the automated data structure generation community states that declarative techniques have better usability than imperative techniques, while imperative techniques have better performance. We show that this reasoning is fundamentally flawed: if we go to the declar…
Web applications often handle sensitive user data, which makes them attractive targets for attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS). Content security policy (CSP) is a content-restriction mechanism, now supported by all major browsers, that offers thorough protection against XS…
Adaptive software systems are designed to cope with unpredictable and evolving usage behaviors and environmental conditions. For these systems reasoning mechanisms are needed to drive evolution, which are usually based on models capturing relevant aspects of the running software.…
System testing and invariant detection is usually conducted from the user interface perspective when the goal is to evaluate the behavior of an application as a whole. A large number of tools and techniques have been developed to generate and automate this process, many of which …
Automatic bug fixing has become a promising direction for reducing manual effort in debugging. However, general approaches to automatic bug fixing may face some fundamental difficulties. In this paper, we argue that automatic fixing of specific types of bugs can be a useful compl…
Defect prediction models help software quality assurance teams to effectively allocate their limited resources to the most defect-prone software modules. A variety of classification techniques have been used to build defect prediction models ranging from simple (e.g., Logistic re…
Detecting memory-safety violations in binaries is complicated by the lack of knowledge of the intended data layout, i.e., the locations and sizes of objects. We present lightweight, static, heuristic analyses for recovering the intended layout of data in a stripped binary. Compar…
In the pull-based development model, the integrator has the crucial role of managing and integrating contributions. This work focuses on the role of the integrator and investigates working habits and challenges alike. We set up an exploratory qualitative study involving a large-s…
The "free app" distribution model has been extremely popular with end users and developers. Developers use mobile ads to generate revenue and cover the cost of developing these free apps. Although the apps are ostensibly free, they in fact do come with hidden costs. Our study of …
Software Product Line (SPL) feature selection involves the optimization of multiple objectives in a large and highly constrained search space. We introduce SATIBEA, that augments multi-objective search-based optimization with constraint solving to address this problem, evaluating…
Testing is a key element of software development processes for the management and assessment of product quality. In most development environments, the software engineers are responsible for ensuring the functional correctness of code. However, for large complex software products,…
When developers add features and fix bugs, they often make systematic edits-similar edits to multiple locations. Systematic edits may indicate that developers should instead refactor to eliminate redundancy. This paper explores this question by designing and implementing a fully …
Predictive trace analysis (PTA) is an effective approach for detecting subtle bugs in concurrent programs. Existing PTA techniques, however, are typically based on adhoc algorithms tailored to low-level errors such as data races or atomicity violations, and are not applicable to …
The surge of search based software engineering research has been hampered by the need to develop customized search algorithms for different classes of the same problem. For instance, two decades of bespoke Combinatorial Interaction Testing (CIT) algorithm development, our exempla…
Effective software engineering demands a coordinated effort. Unfortunately, a comprehensive view on developer coordination is rarely available to support software-engineering decisions, despite the significant implications on software quality, software architecture, and developer…
Researchers are currently drawn to study projects hosted on GitHub due to its popularity, ease of obtaining data, and its distinctive built-in social features. GitHub has been found to create a transparent development environment, which together with a pull request-based workflow…
We propose a new method for dynamically generating likely invariants from multithreaded programs.While existing invariant generation tools work well on sequential programs, they are ineffective at reasoning about multithreaded programs both in terms of the number of real invarian…
One form of crowdsourcing is the competition, which poses an open call for competing solutions. Commercial systems such as TopCoder have begun to explore the application of competitions to software development, but have important limitations diminishing the potential benefits dra…
Traditionally metadata, the who, when, where of a phone call, the IP address, time, date of an Internet connection, has been viewed as deserving of less privacy than the contents of the communication. But ubiquitous computing and communication has changed that equation, and such …
How can organizational factors such as structure and culture have an impact on the working conditions of developers? This study is based on ten months of observation of an in-house software development project within a large telecommunications company. The observation was conduct…