4,951 papers · page 82 of 248
Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) make many software engineering tasks easier by providing automated programming support such as code completion and navigation. However, such support -- and therefore IDEs as awhole -- operate on one revision of the code at a time,…
Good software engineers are essential to the creation of good software. However, most of what we know about software-engineering expertise are vague stereotypes, such as 'excellent communicators' and 'great teammates'. The lack of specificity in our understanding hinders research…
Today, many software systems are configurable with conditional compilation. Just like any software system, configurable systems need to be refactored in their evolution, but their inherent variability induces an additional dimension of complexity that is not addressed well by cur…
Formal verification can provide the highest degree of software assurance. Demand for it is growing, but there are still few projects that have successfully applied it to sizeable, real-world systems. This lack of experience makes it hard to predict the size, effort and duration o…
Recent advances in program repair techniques have raised the possibility of patching bugs automatically. For an automatically generated patch to be accepted by developers, it should not only resolve the bug but also satisfy certain human-related factors including readability and …
The last decade has seen a dramatic growth in the use of constraint solvers as a computational mechanism, not only for analysis of software, but also at runtime. Solvers are available for a variety of logics but are generally restricted to first-order formulas. Some tasks, howeve…
Code examples are small source code fragments whose purpose is to illustrate how a programming language construct, an API, or a specific function/method works. Since code examples are not always available in the software documentation, researchers have proposed techniques to auto…
Software developers working on change tasks commonly experience a broad range of emotions, ranging from happiness all the way to frustration and anger. Research, primarily in psychology, has shown that for certain kinds of tasks, emotions correlate with progress and that biometri…
Sometimes debates on programming languages are more religious than scientific. Questions about which language is more succinct or efficient, or makes developers more productive are discussed with fervor, and their answers are too often based on anecdotes and unsubstantiated belie…
n-gram statistical language model has been successfully applied to capture programming patterns to support code completion and suggestion. However, the approaches using n-gram face challenges in capturing the patterns at higher levels of abstraction due to the mismatch between th…
Performance bugs are programming errors that slow down program execution. While existing techniques can detect various types of performance bugs, a crucial and practical aspect of performance bugs has not received the attention it deserves: how likely are developers to fix a perf…
Higher demands for more reliable and maintainable JavaScript-based web applications have led to the recent development of MVC (Model-View-Controller) frameworks. One of the main advantages of using these frameworks is that they abstract out DOM API method calls, which are one of …
Many program analyses require statically inferring the possible values of composite types. However, current approaches either do not account for correlations between object fields or do so in an ad hoc manner. In this paper, we introduce the problem of composite constant propagat…
Websites routinely distribute small amounts of work to visitors' browsers in order to validate forms, render animations, and perform other computations. This paper examines the feasibility, cost effectiveness, and approaches for increasing the workloads offloaded to web visitors'…
Identifying equivalent mutants remains the largest impediment to the widespread uptake of mutation testing. Despite being researched for more than three decades, the problem remains. We propose Trivial Compiler Equivalence (TCE) a technique that exploits the use of readily availa…
Automatic testing, although useful, is still quite ineffective against faults that do not cause crashes or uncaught exceptions. In the majority of the cases automatic tests do not include oracles, and only in some cases they incorporate assertions that encode the observed behavio…
Before a community can learn general principles, it must share individual experiences. Data sharing is the fundamental step of cross project defect prediction, i.e. the process of using data from one project to predict for defects in another. Prior work on secure data sharing all…
Many software development tasks require developers to quickly learn a subset of an Application Programming Interface (API). API learning resources are crucial for helping developers learn an API, but the knowledge relevant to a particular topic of interest may easily be scattered…
Binary analysis is a well-investigated area in software engineering and security. Given real-world program binaries, generating test inputs which cause the binaries to crash is crucial. Generation of crashing inputs has many applications including off-line analysis of software pr…
Dynamic languages, such as JavaScript, give programmers the freedom to ignore types, and enable them to write concise code in short time. Despite this freedom, many programs follow implicit type rules, for example, that a function has a particular signature or that a property has…