2,847 papers · page 98 of 143
Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software architectures. However, they are usually only stated informally, which may cause problems such as ambiguity and wrong conclusions. A rigorous theory of architectural styles --- consisting of (i) mathematical mod…
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a language used for describing the look and formatting of HTML documents. CSS has been widely adopted in web and mobile development practice, since it enables a clean separation of content from presentation. The language exhibits complex features, …
The better the software development community becomes at creating software, the more software the world seems to demand. Although there is a large body of research about measuring and investigating productivity from an organizational point of view, there is a paucity of research …
Automated techniques have been proposed to either identify refactoring opportunities (i.e., code fragments that can be but have not yet been restructured in a program), or reconstruct historical refactorings (i.e., code restructuring operations that have happened between differen…
The quality of a software architecture is largely dependent upon the underlying architectural decisions at the framework, tactic, and pattern levels. Decisions to adopt certain solutions determine the extent to which desired qualities such as security, availability, and performan…
This paper introduces ARENA (Automatic RElease Notes generAtor), an approach for the automatic generation of release notes. ARENA extracts changes from the source code, summarizes them, and integrates them with information from versioning systems and issue trackers. It was design…
Modern software relies on existing application programming interfaces (APIs) from libraries. Formal specifications for the APIs enable many software engineering tasks as well as help developers correctly use them. In this work, we mine large-scale repositories of existing open-so…
When developing and maintaining a software system, programmers often rely on IDEs to provide editor services such as syntax highlighting, auto-completion, and "jump to declaration". In dynamic web applications, such tool support is currently limited to either the server-side code…
This paper establishes the concept of "preprocessor dependences" as a foundation for building automated refactoring tools that transform source code containing lexical macros and conditional compilation directives, such as those provided by the C preprocessor. We define a preproc…
Although software development involves making numerous decisions amongst alternatives, the design and implementation choices made typically become invisible; what a developer sees in the project's artifacts are the end result of all of the decisions. What if, instead, all of the …
Software Engineers are horrible customers for software tools. If they don't like your tools, they will just write their own. If your tool wastes a few minutes of a developer's day, good luck getting them to ever try your tool again. And if, after years of effort, you manage to de…
Methodology implementation failure is attributed to developer mediocrity (by management) – not to organizational mediocrity (rigidity or control-driven, process-driven management), or to a lack of adaptation capability in the methodology. In supporting software construction as a …
Inexperienced software developers - for example, undergraduates entering the workforce - exhibit a lack of testing skills. They have trouble understanding and applying basic testing techniques. These inexperienced developers are hired by software companies, where this lack of tes…
There are many different approaches to testing software, with different benefits for software quality and the development process. Yet, it is not well understood what developers struggle with when getting started with testing - and why some do not test at all or not as much as wo…
What is the effect of programming languages on software quality? This question has been a topic of much debate for a very long time. In this study, we gather a very large data set from GitHub (729 projects, 80 Million SLOC, 29,000 authors, 1.5 million commits, in 17 languages) in…
Starting from the first investigations with strictly functional languages, reactive programming has been proposed as THE programming paradigm for reactive applications. The advantages of designs based on this style over designs based on the Observer design pattern have been studi…
Designing thread-safe libraries without concurrency defects can be a challenging task. Detecting deadlocks while invoking methods in these libraries concurrently is hard due to the possible number of method invocation combinations, the object assignments to the parameters and the…
The idea of software ecosystems encourages organizations to open software projects for external businesses, governing the cross-organizational development by architectural and other measures. Even within a single organization, this paradigm can be of high value for large-scale de…
One of the biggest challenges in concolic testing, an automatic test generation technique, is its huge search space. Concolic testing generates next inputs by selecting branches from previous execution paths. However, a large number of candidate branches makes a simple exhaustive…
Regression testing is an important activity but can get expensive for large test suites. Test-suite reduction speeds up regression testing by identifying and removing redundant tests based on a given set of requirements. Traditional research on test-suite reduction is rather dive…