4,951 papers · page 98 of 248
Multiple tools can assist developers when debugging programs, but only a few solutions specifically target the common case of regression failures, to provide a more focused and effective support to debugging. In this paper we present RADAR, a tool that combines change identificat…
Model-based reliability estimation of software systems can provide useful insights early in the development process. However, computational complexity of estimating reliability metrics such as mean time to first failure (MTTF) can be prohibitive both in time, space and precision.…
I present an approach to avoid functional failures at runtime in component-based application systems. The approach exploits the intrinsic redundancy of components to find workarounds as alternative sequences of operations to avoid a failure. A first Java prototype is presented, a…
UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry – if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software eng…
Many software development projects struggle with creating and communicating a testing culture that is appropriate for the project's needs. This may degrade software quality by leaving defects undiscovered. Previous research suggests that social coding sites such as GitHub provide…
GitHub projects attract contributions from a community of users with varying coding and quality assurance skills. Developers on GitHub feel a need for automated tests and rely on test suites for regression testing and continuous integration. However, project owners report to ofte…
Stakeholder consultation during course accreditation is now a requirement of new Australian government regulations as well as the Australian ICT professional society accreditation. Despite these requirements there remains some differences between universities and industry regardi…
Test suites, just like the applications they are testing, evolve throughout their lifetime. One of the main reasons for test-suite evolution is test obsolescence: test cases cease to work because of changes in the code and must be suitably repaired. There are several reasons why …
Experience with lightweight formal methods suggests that programmers are willing to write specification if it brings tangible benefits to their usual development activities. This paper considers stronger specifications and studies whether they can be deployed as an incremental pr…
Software engineers produce code that has formal syntax and semantics, which establishes its formal meaning. However, the code also includes significant natural language found primarily in identifier names and comments. Furthermore, the code is surrounded by non-source artifacts, …
Services, such as Stack Overflow, offer a web platform to programmers for discussing technical issues, in form of Question and Answers (Q&A). Since Q&A services store the discussions, the generated “crowd knowledge” can be accessed and consumed by a large audience for a long time…
Work practices vary among software developers. Some are highly focused on a few artifacts; others make wideranging contributions. Similarly, some artifacts are mostly authored, or “owned”, by one or few developers; others have very wide ownership. Focus and ownership are related …
Object ownership enforces encapsulation within object-oriented programs by forbidding incoming aliases into objects' representations. Many common data structures, such as collections with iterators, require incoming aliases, so there has been much work on relaxing ownership's enc…
Languages with inheritance and polymorphism assume that a subclass instance can substitute a superclass instance without causing behavioral differences for clients of the superclass. However, programmers may accidentally create subclasses that are semantically incompatible with t…
Brazil has been emerging as a destination for IT software and services. The country already had a strong domestic base of IT clients to global companies. One of the competitive factors is time zone location. Brazil has positioned itself as easy for collaboration because of time z…
Software is created by people for people working in a range of environments and under various conditions. Understanding the cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial in order to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improve the creation and…
Knowledge of similar code fragments, also known as code clones, is important to many software maintenance activities including bug fixing, refactoring, impact analysis and program comprehension. While a great deal of research has been conducted for finding techniques and implemen…
Defect prediction techniques could potentially help us to focus quality-assurance efforts on the most defect-prone files. Modern statistical tools make it very easy to quickly build and deploy prediction models. Software metrics are at the heart of prediction models; understandin…
Both employers and graduate schools expect computer science graduates to be able to work as developers on software projects. Software engineering courses present the opportunity in the curriculum to learn the relevant skills. This paper presents our experience from Wayne State Un…
When a developer works on code that is shared with other developers, she needs to know why the code has been changed in particular ways to avoid reintroducing bugs. A developer looking at a code change may have access to a short commit message or a link to a bug report which may …