4,951 papers · page 85 of 248
Failed error propagation (FEP) is known to hamper software testing, yet it remains poorly understood. We introduce an information theoretic formulation of FEP that is based on measures of conditional entropy. This formulation considers the situation in which we are interested in …
Most application code evolves incrementally, and especially so when being maintained after the applications have been deployed. Yet, most data-flow analyses do not take advantage of this fact. Instead they require clients to recompute the entire analysis even if little code has c…
We present MergePoint, a new binary-only symbolic execution system for large-scale and fully unassisted testing of commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) software. MergePoint introduces veritesting, a new technique that employs static symbolic execution to amplify the effect of dynamic s…
System designers today are focusing less on point solutions for complex systems and more on design spaces, often with a focus on understanding tradeoffs among non-functional properties across such spaces. This shift places a premium on the efficient comparative evaluation of non-…
In this paper, we present the results from two surveys related to data science applied to software engineering. The first survey solicited questions that software engineers would like data scientists to investigate about software, about software processes and practices, and about…
Testing large software packages can become very time intensive. To address this problem, researchers have investigated techniques such as Test Suite Minimization. Test Suite Minimization reduces the number of tests in a suite by removing tests that appear redundant, at the risk o…
Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to debug and understand. A common way of gaining insight into system behavior is to inspect execution logs and documentation. Unfortunately, manual inspection of logs is an arduous process, and documentation is often incomplete and out…
Modern software applications store their data in remote cloud servers. Users interact with these applications using web browsers or thin clients running on mobile devices. A key issue in dependability of these applications is the correctness of the actions that update the data st…
Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) have seen an increase in popularity relative to traditional Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCS). Yet we know little on whether developers are benefitting from the extra power of DVCS. Without such knowledge, researchers, developer…
Mainstream programming languages provide built-in exception handling mechanisms to support robust and maintainable implementation of exception handling in software systems. Most of these modern languages, such as C#, Ruby, Python and many others, are often claimed to have more ap…
Many predictive deadlock detection techniques analyze multithreaded programs to suggest potential deadlocks (referred to as cycles or deadlock warnings). Nonetheless, many of such cycles are false positives. On checking these cycles, existing dynamic deadlock confirmation techniq…
Despite the recent advances in automatic test generation, testers must still write test oracles manually. If formal specifications are available, it might be possible to use decision procedures derived from those specifications. We present a technique that is based on a form of s…
With the popularity of smartphones and mobile devices, mobile application (a.k.a. “app”) markets have been growing exponentially in terms of number of users and downloads. App developers spend considerable effort on collecting and exploiting user feedback to improve user satisfac…
Besides traditional problems such as potential bugs, (smartphone) application clones on Android markets bring new threats. That is, attackers clone the code from legitimate Android applications, assemble it with malicious code or advertisements, and publish these ``purpose-added"…
A self-adaptive system uses runtime models to adapt its architecture to the changing requirements and contexts. However, there is no one-to-one mapping between the requirements in the problem space and the architectural elements in the solution space. Instead, one refined require…
Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) provides developers a conceptual abstraction for mapping the application code to the underlying databases. ORM is widely used in industry due to its convenience; permitting developers to focus on developing the business logic without worrying too m…
Most approaches for adaptive systems rely on models, particularly behaviour or architecture models, which describe the system and the environment in which it operates. One of the difficulties in creating such models is uncertainty about the accuracy and completeness of the models…
Goal oriented methods have been successfully employed for eliciting and elaborating software requirements. When goals are assigned to an agent, they have to be operationalised: the agent’s operations have to be refined, by equipping them with appropriate enabling and triggering c…
Spreadsheets are widely used by end users for numerical computation in their business. Spreadsheet cells whose computation is subject to the same semantics are often clustered in a row or column. When a spreadsheet evolves, these cell clusters can degenerate due to ad hoc modific…
When developers use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they often rely on documentation to assist their tasks. In previous studies, we reported evidence indicating that static type systems acted as a form of implicit documentation, benefiting developer productivity. Such …