4,951 papers · page 88 of 248
In plugin-based systems, plugin conflicts may occur when two or more plugins interfere with one another, changing their expected behaviors. It is highly challenging to detect plugin conflicts due to the exponential explosion of the combinations of plugins (i.e., configurations). …
Program invariants are important for defect detection, program verification, and program repair. However, existing techniques have limited support for important classes of invariants such as disjunctions, which express the semantics of conditional statements. We propose a method …
A frequently occurring usage of program elements in a programming language and software libraries is called a usage pattern. In JavaScript (JS) Web applications, JS usage patterns in their source code have special characteristics that pose challenges in pattern mining. They invol…
Energy-efficiency is a key concern in continuously-running mobile applications, such as those for health and context monitoring. Unfortunately, developers must implement complex and customized power-management policies for each application. This involves the use of complex primit…
JavaScript is used in web applications for achieving rich user interfaces and implementing core functionality. Unfortunately, JavaScript code is known to be prone to faults. In an earlier study, we found that over 65% of such faults are caused by the interaction of JavaScript cod…
Asynchronous programming is in demand today, because responsiveness is increasingly important on all modern devices. Yet, we know little about how developers use asynchronous programming in practice. Without such knowledge, developers, researchers, language and library designers,…
Build, creating software from source code, is a fundamental activity in software development. Build teams manage this process and ensure builds are produced reliably and efficiently. This paper presents an exploration into the nature of build teams--how they form, work, and relat…
Automated program repair recently received considerable attentions, and many techniques on this research area have been proposed. Among them, two genetic-programming-based techniques, GenProg and Par, have shown the promising results. In particular, GenProg has been used as the b…
The all-important goal of delivering better software at lower cost has led to a vital, enduring quest for ways to find and remove defects efficiently and accurately. To this end, two parallel lines of research have emerged over the last years. Static analysis seeks to find defect…
Software engineering research and practice are hampered by the lack of a well-understood, top-level dependent variable. Recent initiatives on General Theory of Software Engineering suggest a multifaceted variable – Software Engineering Success. However, its exact dimensions are u…
Many guidelines for safety-critical industries such as aeronautics, medical devices, and railway communications, specify that traceability must be used to demonstrate that a rigorous process has been followed and to provide evidence that the system is safe for use. In practice, t…
Hidden code dependencies are responsible for many complications in maintenance tasks. With the introduction of variable features in configurable systems, dependencies may even cross feature boundaries, causing problems that are prone to be detected late. Many current implementati…
Source Code Summarization is an emerging technology for automatically generating brief descriptions of code. Current summarization techniques work by selecting a subset of the statements and keywords from the code, and then including information from those statements and keywords…
Software product lines and model transformations are two techniques used in industry for managing the development of highly complex software. Product line approaches simplify the handling of software variants while model transformations automate software manipulations such as ref…
Contracts are a popular tool for specifying the functional behavior of software. This paper characterizes the contracts that developers write, the contracts that developers could write, and how a developer reacts when shown the difference.
Building is an integral part of the software development process. However, little is known about the compiler errors that occur in this process. In this paper, we present an empirical study of 26.6 million builds produced during a period of nine months by thousands of developers.…
Data privacy when using online systems like Facebook and Amazon has become an increasingly popular topic in the last few years. However, only a little is known about how users and developers perceive privacy and which concrete measures would mitigate their privacy concerns. To in…
Program comprehension is an important cognitive process that inherently eludes direct measurement. Thus, researchers are struggling with providing suitable programming languages, tools, or coding conventions to support developers in their everyday work. In this paper, we explore …
The microblogging service Twitter has over 500 million users posting over 500 million tweets daily. Research has established that software developers use Twitter in their work, but this has not yet been examined in detail. Twitter is an important medium in some software engineeri…
Crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising approach which involves delegating a variety of tasks to an unknown workforce - the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been applied quite successfully in various contexts from basic tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to solving complex industry probl…