4,951 papers · page 97 of 248
Adding features and fixing bugs often require systematic edits that make similar, but not identical, changes to many code locations. Finding all the relevant locations and making the correct edits is a tedious and error-prone process for developers. This paper addresses both prob…
Target audience: Software practitioners and researchers wanting to understand the state of the art in using data science for software engineering (SE). Content: In the age of big data, data science (the knowledge of deriving meaningful outcomes from data) is an essential skill th…
When software engineers fix bugs, they may have several options as to how to fix those bugs. Which fix they choose has many implications, both for practitioners and researchers: What is the risk of introducing other bugs during the fix? Is the bug fix in the same code that caused…
Modern integrated development environments (IDEs) support one live codebase at a given moment, which imposes limitations to software development. For example, with only one codebase, the developer must pause development while running tests, or a static analysis, as any edit could…
Configurable software systems allow users to customize them according to their needs. Supporting such variability is commonly divided into three parts: configuration space, build space, and code space. In this research abstract, we describe our work in exploring what information …
Many software defect prediction approaches have been proposed and most are effective in within-project prediction settings. However, for new projects or projects with limited training data, it is desirable to learn a prediction model by using sufficient training data from existin…
Scenario-finding tools such as Alloy are widely used to understand the consequences of specifications, with applications to software modeling, security analysis, and verification. This paper focuses on the exploration of scenarios: which scenarios are presented first, and how to …
There is a growing interest of the Computer Science education community for including testing concepts on introductory programming courses. Aiming at contributing to this issue, we introduce POPT, a Problem-Oriented Programming and Testing approach for Introductory Programming Co…
Debugging mobile phone applications is hard, as current debugging techniques either require multiple computing devices or do not support graphical debugging. To address this problem we present GROPG, the first graphical on-phone debugger. We implement GROPG for Android and perfor…
PHP is a server-side language that is widely used for creating dynamic Web applications. However, as a dynamic language, PHP may induce certain programming errors that reveal themselves only at run time. A common type of error is dangling references, which occur if the referred p…
Debugging consumes significant time and effort in any major software development project. Moreover, even after the root cause of a bug is identified, fixing the bug is non-trivial. Given this situation, automated program repair methods are of value. In this paper, we present an a…
Performance bugs are programming errors that create significant performance degradation. While developers often use automated oracles for detecting functional bugs, detecting performance bugs usually requires time-consuming, manual analysis of execution profiles. The human effort…
Studying human analyst's behavior in automated tracing is a new research thrust. Building on a growing body of work in this area, we offer a novel approach to understanding requirements analyst's information seeking and gathering. We model analysts as predators in pursuit of prey…
In 2006, Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future (ISBN 0-9786956-0-7) documented the results of a year-long study on ultra-large, complex, distributed systems. Ultra-large-scale (ULS) systems are socio-technical ecosystems of ultra-large size on one or man…
Applications that continuously gather and disclose personal information about users are increasingly common. While disclosing this information may be essential for these applications to function, it may also raise privacy concerns. Partly, this is due to frequently changing conte…
To produce an optimal component-based software system for a given application, it is necessary to consider both the required functionality of the system and its stakeholders' preferences over various non-functional properties. We propose a new modular end-to-end framework for com…
In this paper we describe distributed Scrum augmented with best practices in global software engineering (GSE) as an important paradigm for teaching critical competencies in GSE. We report on a globally distributed project course between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aal…
User involvement in software engineering has been researched over the last three decades. However, existing studies concentrate mainly on early phases of user-centered design projects, while little is known about how professionals work with post-deployment end-user feedback. In t…
Information Retrieval (IR) methods, and in particular topic models, have recently been used to support essential software engineering (SE) tasks, by enabling software textual retrieval and analysis. In all these approaches, topic models have been used on software artifacts in a s…
Concurrency bugs are difficult to find because they occur with specific memory-access orderings between threads. Traditional bug-finding techniques for concurrent programs have focused on detecting raw-memory accesses representing the bugs, and they do not identify memory accesse…