4,951 papers · page 83 of 248
Symbolic execution is a powerful, systematic analysis that has received much visibility in the last decade. Scalability however remains a major challenge for symbolic execution. Compositional analysis is a well-known general purpose methodology for increasing scalability. This pa…
A process theory is an explanation of how an entity changes and develops. While software engineering is fundamentally concerned with how software artifacts change and develop, little research explicitly builds and empirically evaluates software engineering process theories. This …
Fluent linear temporal logic is a formalism for specifying properties of event-based systems, based on propositions called fluents, defined in terms of activating and deactivating events. In this paper, we propose complementing the notion of fluent by the related concept of count…
For the analysis of highly configurable systems, analysis approaches need to take the inherent variability of these systems into account. The notion of presence conditions is central to such approaches. A presence condition specifies a subset of system configurations in which a c…
Static analysis tools help developers find bugs, improve code readability, and ensure consistent style across a project. However, these tools can be difficult to smoothly integrate with each other and into the developer workflow, particularly when scaling to large codebases. We p…
Regression testing is widely used in practice for validating program changes. However, running large regression suites can be costly. Researchers have developed several techniques for prioritizing tests such that the higher-priority tests have a higher likelihood of finding bugs.…
Background: Most of the experiments in software engineering (SE) employ students as subjects. This raises concerns about the realism of the results acquired through students and adaptability of the results to software industry. Aim: We compare students and professionals to unders…
Empirical methods have grown common in software engineering, but there is no consensus on how to apply them properly. Is practical relevance key? Do internally valid studies have any value? Should we replicate more to address the tradeoff between internal and external validity? W…
Summary form only given. The software and hardware development in Ferrari F1 is characterized by a very short cycle time. Typically during the in-season development, the fixes and new developments need to be addressed in few days, in order to be ready for the following race. At t…
Developers sometimes take the initiative to build toolsto solve problems they face. What motivates developers to buildthese tools? What is the value for a company? Are the tools builtuseful for anyone besides their creator? We conducted a qualitativestudy of tool building, adopti…
Data flow testing (DFT) focuses on the flow of data through a program. Despite its higher fault-detection ability over other structural testing techniques, practical DFT remains a significant challenge. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a hybrid DFT framework: (1) …
Regression occurs when code changes introduce failures in previously passing test cases. As software evolves, regressions may be introduced. Fixing regression errors manually is time-consuming and error-prone. We propose an approach of automated repair of software regressions, ca…
The reliability of a prediction model depends on the quality of the data from which it was trained. Therefore, defect prediction models may be unreliable if they are trained using noisy data. Recent research suggests that randomly-injected noise that changes the classification (l…
Concurrent programs proliferate as multi-core technologies advance. The regression testing of concurrent programs often requires running a failing test for weeks before catching a faulty interleaving, due to the myriad of possible interleavings of memory accesses arising from con…
In past and recent years, the issues related to managing technical debt received significant attention by researchers from both industry and academia. There are several factors that contribute to technical debt. One of these is represented by code bad smells, i.e., Symptoms of po…
Type qualifier inference tools usually operate in batch mode and assume that the program must not be changed except to add the type qualifiers. In practice, programs must be changed to make them type-correct, and programmers must understand them. Cascade is an interactive type qu…
A (build) target specifies the information that is needed to automatically build a software artifact. This paper focuses on underutilized targets - an important dependency problem that we identified at Google. An underutilized target is one with files not needed by some of its de…
The tension between software architecture and agility is not well understood by agile practitioners or researchers. If an agile software team spends too little time designing architecture up-front then the team faces increased risk and higher chance of failure, if the team spends…
Software is rapidly increasing in size and complexity. Static analyses must be designed to scale well if they are to be usable with realistic applications, but prior efforts have often been limited by available memory. We propose a database-backed strategy for large program analy…
Software analysis tools and techniques often leverage structural code coverage information to reason about the dynamic behavior of software. Existing techniques instrument the code with the required structural obligations and then monitor the execution of the compiled code to rep…