2,847 papers · page 94 of 143
Software developers pursue a wide range of activities as part of their work, and making sense of what they did in a given time frame is far from trivial as evidenced by the large number of awareness and coordination tools that have been developed in recent years. To inform tool d…
Software processes comprise many steps; coding is followed by building, integration testing, system testing, deployment, operations, among others. Software process integration and automation have been areas of key concern in software engineering, ever since the pioneering work of…
The wide diffusion of mobile devices has motivated research towards optimizing energy consumption of software systems— including apps—targeting such devices. Besides efforts aimed at dealing with various kinds of energy bugs, the adoption of Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) sc…
Developers deal with the persistent problem of understanding non-trivial code snippets. To understand the given implementation, its issues, and available choices, developers will benefit from reading relevant discussions and descriptions over the web. However, there is no easy wa…
Embedded systems are omnipresent in the modern world. This naturally includes the automobile industry, where electronic functions are becoming prevalent. In the automotive domain, embedded systems today are highly distributed systems and manufactured in great numbers and variance…
We present UMTG, a toolset for automatically generating executable and traceable system test cases from use case specifications. UMTG employs Natural Language Processing (NLP), a restricted form of use case specifications, and constraint solving. Use cases are expected to follow …
Making threaded programs safe and easy to reason about is one of the chief difficulties in modern programming. This work provides an efficient execution model for SCOOP, a concurrency approach that provides not only data-race freedom but also pre/postcondition reasoning guarantee…
Automatically generating test suites with high coverage is of great importance to software engineers, but this process is hindered by the vast amount of parameters the tools use to generate tests. Developers usually lack knowledge about the workings of the tools that generate tes…
Security tools could help developers find critical vulnerabilities, yet such tools remain underused. We surveyed developers from 14 companies and 5 mailing lists about their reasons for using and not using security tools. The resulting thirty-nine predictors of security tool use …
In our prior research, we found that problematic architectural connections can propagate errors. We also found that among multiple files, the architectural connections that violate common design principles strongly correlate with the error-proneness of files. The flawed architect…
Traditional test oracles are defined on the outputs of test executions, and cannot assert internal states of executions. Traditional assertions are common to all test execution, and are usually more difficult to construct than on oracle for one test input. In this paper we propos…
Configuration problems are not only prevalent, but also severely impair the reliability of today's system software. One fundamental reason is the ever-increasing complexity of configuration, reflected by the large number of configuration parameters ("knobs"). With hundreds of kno…
Software development has to cope with uncertainties and changing requirements that constantly arise in the development process. Agile methods address this challenge by adopting an incremental development process and delivering working software frequently. However, current validat…
Developers reproduce crashes to understand root causes during software debugging. To reduce the manual effort by developers, automatic methods of crash reproduction generate new test cases for triggering crashes. However, due to the complex program structures, it is challenging t…
The advent of multicore processors has greatly increased the prevalence of concurrent programs to achieve higher performance. As programs evolve, test suite augmentation techniques are used in regression testing to identify where new test cases are needed and then generate them. …
The essence of refactoring is to improve software quality via the systematic combination of primitive refactorings. Yet, there are way too many refactorings. Choosing which refactorings to use, how to combine them and how to integrate them in more complex evolution tasks is reall…
Code coverage is a popular test adequacy criterion in practice. Code coverage, however, remains controversial as there is a lack of coherent empirical evidence for its relation with test suite effectiveness. More recently, test suite size has been shown to be highly correlated wi…
Mining software repositories to understand and improve software development is a common approach in research and practice. The operational data obtained from these repositories often do not faithfully represent the intended aspects of software development and, therefore, may jeop…
Writing efficient synchronization for multithreaded programs is notoriously hard. The resulting code often contains subtle concurrency bugs. Even worse, many bug fixes introduce new bugs. A classic example, seen widely in practice, is deadlocks resulting from fixing of an atomici…
Every programmer has a characteristic style, ranging from preferences about identifier naming to preferences about object relationships and design patterns. Coding conventions define a consistent syntactic style, fostering readability and hence maintainability. When collaborating…