The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
Defect reporting and correction is one of the most crucial part in any phase of software development. This is a very costly activity. A lot of time, effort and resources can be saved if the defects can be predicted beforehand, using a suitable training data set. For this, the generation of defect reports which reports the classes that are defective and computes the required software metrics is required...
Debugging is the process of detecting errors or defects in a computer software or a system, and resolving them so that the program works correctly. All the software processing levels have different debugging approaches because parallel programs produce different types of errors while multithreaded programs produce errors due to non-deterministic nature of threads. In this paper I would be explaining...
Post-silicon validation is the last level of inspecting the silicon before it is delivered to the customer. Automotive microcontrollers use Direct Memory Access (DMA) extensively in safety critical applications. This article explains how post-silicon validation can be improved to address the needs of the growing complexity of microcontrollers with a large number of Intellectual Property (IP). With...
Currently, there is a "boom" in introductory programming courses to help students develop their computational thinking skills. Providing timely, personalized feedback that makes students reflect about what and why they did correctly or incorrectly is critical in such courses. However, the limited number of instructors and the great volume of submissions instructors need to assess, especially...
In many fields of software engineering, studies on human behavior have attracted a lot of attention; however, few such studies exist in automated debugging. Parnin and Orso conducted a pioneering study comparing the performance of programmers in debugging with and without a ranking-based fault localization technique, namely Spectrum-Based Fault Localization (SBFL). In this paper, we revisit the actual...
Many bugs in JavaScript applications manifest themselves as objects that have incorrect property values when a failure occurs. For this type of error, stack traces and log files are often insufficient for diagnosing problems. In such cases, it is helpful for developers to know the control flow path from the creation of an object to a crashing statement. Such crash paths are useful for understanding...
The application of information retrieval techniques to search tasks in software engineering is made difficult by the lexical gap between search queries, usually expressed in natural language (e.g. English), and retrieved documents, usually expressed in code (e.g. programming languages). This is often the case in bug and feature location, community question answering, or more generally the communication...
Our community constantly pushes the state-of-the-art by introducing “new” techniques. These techniques often build on top of, and are compared against, existing systems that realize previously published techniques. The underlying assumption is that existing systems correctly represent the techniques they implement. This pa- per examines that assumption through a study of KLEE, a popular and well-cited...
Manual deadlock fixing is error-prone and time-consuming. Exist-ing generic approach (GA) simply inserts gate locks to fix dead-locks by serializing executions, which could introduce various new deadlocks and incur high runtime overhead. We propose a novel approach DFixer to fix deadlocks without introducing any new deadlocks by design. DFixer only selects one thread of a deadlock to pre-acquire a...
Automated test generation tools have been widely investigated with the goal of reducing the cost of testing activities. However, generated tests have been shownnot to help developers in detecting and finding more bugs even though they reach higher structural coverage compared to manual testing. The main reason is that generated tests are difficult to understand and maintain. Our paper proposes an...
In a large, long-lived project, an effective code review process is key to ensuring the long-term quality of the code base. In this work, we study code review practices of a large, open source project, and we investigate how the developers themselves perceive code review quality. We present a qualitative study that summarizes the results from a survey of 88 Mozilla core developers. The results provide...
Integer overflow (IO) vulnerabilities can be exploited by attackers to compromise computer systems. In the meantime, IOs can be used intentionally by programmers for benign purposes such as hashing and random number generation. Hence, differentiating exploitable and harmful IOs from intentional and benign ones is an important challenge. It allows reducing the number of false positives produced by...
Since debugging is a time-consuming activity, automated program repair tools such as GenProg have garnered interest. A recent study revealed that the majority of GenProg repairs avoid bugs simply by deleting functionality. We found that SPR, a state-of-the-art repair tool proposed in 2015, still deletes functionality in their many "plausible" repairs. Unlike generate-and-validate systems...
Real software, the kind working programmers produce by the kLOC to solve real-world problems, tends to be “natural”, like speech or natural language; it tends to be highly repetitive and predictable. Researchers have captured this naturalness of software through statistical models and used them to good effect in suggestion engines, porting tools, coding standards checkers, and idiom miners. This suggests...
Developers have to to constantly improve their apps by fixing critical bugs and implementing the most desired features in order to gain shares in the continuously increasing and competitive market of mobile apps. A precious source of information to plan such activities is represented by reviews left by users on the app store. However, in order to exploit such information developers need to manually...
While developers are aware of the importance of comprehensively testing patches, the large effort involved in coming up with relevant test cases means that such testing rarely happens in practice. Furthermore, even when test cases are written to cover the patch, they often exercise the same behaviour in the old and the new version of the code. In this paper, we present a symbolic execution-based technique...
Software engineering involves a lot of change as code artifacts are not only created once but maintained over time. In the last 25 years, major paradigms of program development have arisen – agile development with refactorings, software product lines, moving sequential code to multicore or cloud, etc. Each is centered on particular kinds of change; their conceptual foundations rely on transformations...
Smartphones and tablets have established themselves as mainstays in the modern computing landscape. It is conceivable that in the near future such devices may supplant laptops and desktops, becoming many users primary means of carrying out typical computer assisted tasks. In turn, this means that mobile applications will continue on a trajectory to becoming more complex, and the primary focus of millions...
As the popularity of mobile smart devices continues to climb the complexity of “apps” continues to increase, making the development and maintenance process challenging. Current bug tracking systems lack key features to effectively support construction of reports with actionable information that directly lead to a bug’s resolution. In this demo we present the implementation of a novel bug reporting...
Agile approaches to software development offer flexibility and autonomy to developers, while demanding discipline and attentiveness. At its best, agile constitutes an idealized vision of Wenger’s Community of Practice: one where the essence of the software practice is freely negotiated by participants following self-determined trajectories of identity within the community. While agile frameworks prescribe...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.