3,458 papers · page 97 of 173
Characterizing software changes is fundamental for software maintenance. However existing techniques are imprecise leading to unnecessary maintenance efforts. We introduce a novel approach that computes a precise numeric characterization of program changes, which quantifies the l…
Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse but often very hard to learn from scratch. Although good documentation helps on reducing the learning curve, it is often found lacking, and costly, as it needs to attend different audiences with disparate learn…
Understanding the behavior of source code written in an unfamiliar programming language is difficult. One way to aid understanding of difficult code is to add corresponding pseudo-code, which describes in detail the workings of the code in a natural language such as English. In s…
Recurring bugs are common in software systems, especially in client programs that depend on the same framework. Existing research uses human-written templates, and is limited to certain types of bugs. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic approach to fixing recurring crash …
The formal verification of finite-state probabilistic models supports the engineering of software with strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. However, its use in software design is currently a tedious process of manual multiobjective optimisation. Software designers must b…
Software engineering meta-data (SE data), such as revision control data, Github project data or test reports, is typically semi-structured, it comprises a mixture of formatted and free-text fields and is often self-describing. Semi-structured SE data cannot be queried in a SQL-li…
Formal verification has advanced to the point that developers can verify the correctness of small, critical modules. Unfortunately, despite considerable efforts, determining if a "verification" verifies what the author intends is still difficult. Previous approaches are difficult…
Recently, Begel et al. found that one of the most important questions software developers ask is "what parts of software are used/loved by users." User reviews provide an effective channel to address this question. However, most existing review summarization tools treat reviews a…
App marketplaces are distribution platforms for mobile applications that serve as a communication channel between users and developers. These platforms allow users to write reviews about downloaded apps. Recent studies found that such reviews include information that is useful fo…
Mobile apps are becoming complex software systems that must be developed quickly and evolve continuously to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. However, addressing these requirements may result in poor design choices, also known as antipatterns, which may incidental…
PHP allows the names of variables, classes, functions, methods, and properties to be given dynamically, as expressions that, when evaluated, return an identifier as a string. While this provides greater flexibility for programmers, it also makes PHP programs harder to precisely a…
Programmers maintain and evolve their software in a variety of programming languages to take advantage of various control/data abstractions and legacy libraries. The programming language ecosystem has diversified over the last few decades, and non-trivial programs are likely to b…
Lazy-CSeq is a context-bounded verification tool for sequentially consistent C programs using POSIX threads. It first translates a multi-threaded C program into a bounded nondeterministic sequential C program that preserves bounded reachability for all round-robin schedules up to…
Software modernization often involves complex code transformations that convert legacy code to new architectures or platforms, while preserving the semantics of the original programs. We present the lessons learnt from an industrial software modernization project of considerable …
Automated program repair can potentially reduce debugging costs and improve software quality but recent studies have drawn attention to shortcomings in the quality of automatically generated repairs. We propose a new kind of repair that uses the large body of existing open-source…
Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming, changes to the base-code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. Deciding which pointcuts have broken due to base-code changes is a daunting venture, especiall…
We present a novel approach to analyze large-scale JavaScript applications statically by tuning the analysis scalability possibly giving up its soundness. For a given sound static baseline analysis of JavaScript programs, our framework allows users to define a sound approximation…
In software performance engineering, what-if scenarios, architecture optimization, capacity planning, run-time adaptation, and uncertainty management of realistic models typically require the evaluation of many instances. Effective analysis is however hindered by two orthogonal s…
Bug localization refers to the automated process of locating the potential buggy files for a given bug report. To help developers focus their attention to those files is crucial. Several existing automated approaches for bug localization from a bug report face a key challenge, ca…
Software systems are often developed and released without formal specifications. For those systems that are formally specified, developers have to continuously maintain and update the specifications or have them fall out of date. To deal with the absence of formal specifications,…