4,951 papers · page 84 of 248
Software Fault Injection (SFI) is an established technique for assessing the robustness of a software under test by exposing it to faults in its operational environment. Depending on the complexity of this operational environment, the complexity of the software under test, and th…
We propose and implement a new approach, Document-Assisted Symbolic Execution (DASE), to improve automated test generation and bug detection. DASE leverages natural language processing techniques and heuristics to analyze program documentation to extract input constraints automat…
Test cases that drive an application under test via its graphical user interface (GUI) consist of sequences of steps that perform actions on, or verify the state of, the application user interface. Such tests can be hard to maintain, especially if they are not properly modularize…
Mobile malware attempts to evade detection during app analysis by mimicking security-sensitive behaviors of benign apps that provide similar functionality (e.g., sending SMS messages), and suppressing their payload to reduce the chance of being observed (e.g., executing only its …
Android software presents many challenges for static program analysis. In this work we focus on the fundamental problem of static control-flow analysis. Traditional analyses cannot be directly applied to Android because the applications are framework-based and event-driven. We co…
We propose a new automated debugging method for regression testing based on a synergistic application of both dynamic and semantic analysis. Our method takes a failure- inducing test input, a buggy program, and an earlier correct version of the same program, and computes a minima…
Programmers often need to revert some code to an earlier state, or restore a block of code that was deleted a while ago. However, support for this backtracking in modern programming environments is limited. Many of the backtracking tasks can be accomplished by having a selective …
Security patterns are well-known solutions to security-specific problems. They are often claimed to benefit designers without much security expertise. We have performed an empirical study to investigate whether the usage of security patterns by such an audience leads to a more se…
Debugging is an indispensable yet frustrating activity in software development and maintenance. Thus, numerous techniques have been proposed to aid this task. Despite the demonstrated effectiveness and future potential of these techniques, many of them have the unrealistic single…
Multi-threaded programs play an increasingly important role in current multi-core environments. Exposing concurrency bugs and debugging such multi-threaded programs have become quite challenging due to their inherent non-determinism. In order to eliminate such non-determinism, ma…
A challenging problem in software engineering is to check if a program has an execution path satisfying a regular property. We propose a novel method of dynamic symbolic execution (DSE) to automatically find a path of a program satisfying a regular property. What makes our method…
Developers often inspect a diff patch during peer code reviews. Diff patches show low-level program differences per file without summarizing systematic changes -- similar, related changes to multiple contexts. We present Critics, an interactive approach for inspecting systematic …
Software bugs can cause significant financial loss and even the loss of human lives. To reduce such loss, developers devote substantial efforts to fixing bugs, which generally requires much expertise and experience. Various approaches have been proposed to aid debugging. An inter…
Logging is a common programming practice of practical importance to collect system runtime information for postmortem analysis. Strategic logging placement is desired to cover necessary runtime information without incurring unintended consequences (e.g., Performance overhead, tri…
This paper presents a novel energy-aware and temperature-aware programming model with first-class support for sustainability. A program written in the new language, named Eco, may adaptively adjusts its own behaviors to stay on a given (energy or temperature) budget, avoiding bot…
It is well-known that using floating-point numbers may inevitably result in inaccurate results and sometimes even cause serious software failures. Safety-critical software often has strict requirements on the upper bound of inaccuracy, and a crucial task in testing is to check wh…
Programming languages evolve over time, adding additional language features to simplify common tasks and make the language easier to use. For example, the Java Language Specification has four editions and is currently drafting a fifth. While the addition of language features is d…
To implement the atomicity in accessing the irregular data structure, developers often use the coarse-grained locking because the hierarchical nature of the data structure makes the reasoning of fine-grained locking difficult and error-prone for the update of an ancestor field in…
Many existing enterprise applications are at a mature stage in their development and are unable to easily benefit from the usability gains offered by adaptive user interfaces (UIs). Therefore, a method is needed for integrating adaptive UI capabilities into these systems without …
Web applications have become one of the fastest growing types of software systems today. Despite their popularity, understanding the behaviour of modern web applications is still a challenging endeavour for developers during development and maintenance tasks. The challenges mainl…