FSE

When working on a large software system, a programmer typically spends an inordinate amount of time sifting through thousands of artifacts to find just the subset of information needed to complete an assigned task. All too often, before completing the ...

Program refactoring using design patterns is an attractive approach for facilitating anticipated changes. Its benefit depends on at least two factors, namely the effort involved in the refactoring and how effective it is. For example, the benefit would ...

Though many tools are available to help programmers working on change tasks, and several studies have been conducted to understand how programmers comprehend systems, little is known about the specific kinds of questions programmers ask when evolving a ...

The change history of a software project contains a rich collection of code changes that record previous development experience. Changes that fix bugs are especially interesting, since they record both the old buggy code and the new fixed code. This ...

Recent software systems usually feature an automated failure reporting system, with which a huge number of failing traces are collected every day. In order to prioritize fault diagnosis, failing traces due to the same fault are expected to be grouped ...

Testing and code editing are interleaved activities during program development. When tests fail unexpectedly, the changes that caused the failure(s) are not always easy to find. We explore how change classification can focus programmer attention on ...

We present a study of all sources of aliasing in over one million lines of C code, identifying in the process the common patterns of aliasing that arise in practice. We find that aliasing has a great deal of structure in real programs and that just nine ...

Fixing runtime bugs in long running programs using trace based analyses such as dynamic slicing was believed to be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present a novel execution fast forwarding technique that makes this feasible. While a naive ...

Recent advances in static program analysis have made it possible to detect errors in applications that have been thoroughly tested and are in wide-spread use. The ability to find errors that have eluded traditional validation methods is due to the ...

Interpolation based automatic abstraction is a powerful and robust technique for the automated analysis of hardware and software systems. Its use has however been limited to control-dominated applications because of a lack of algorithms for computing ...

We consider the problem if a given program satisfies a specified safety property. Interesting programs have infinite state spaces, with inputs ranging over infinite domains, and for these programs the property checking problem is undecidable. Two broad ...

Bitwise operations are commonly used in low-level systems code to access multiple data fields that have been packed into a single word. Program analysis tools that reason about such programs must model the semantics of bitwise operations precisely in ...

Regression testing is an important but expensive activity, and a great deal of research on regression testing methodologies has been performed. In recent years, much of this research has emphasized empirical studies, including evaluations of the ...

It is usually assumed that the implementation of exception handling can be better modularized by the use of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). However, the trade-offs involved in using AOP with this goal are not well-understood. This paper presents an ...

Repeated changes to a software system can introduce small weaknesses such as unplanned dependencies between different parts of the system. While such problems usually go undetected, their cumulative effect can result in a noticeable decrease in the ...

SQL injection attacks pose a serious threat to the security of Web applications because they can give attackers unrestricted access to databases that contain sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a new, highly automated approach for ...

Atomicity is a desirable property for business processes to conduct transactions in Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration. Although it is possible to reason about atomicity of B2B collaboration using the public views, yet such reasoning requires the ...

Models are increasingly recognized as an effective means for elaborating requirements and exploring designs. For complex systems, model building is far from an easy task. Efforts were therefore recently made to automate parts of this process, notably, ...

Property specifications concisely describe aspects of what a system is supposed to do. No matter what notation is used to describe them, however, it is difficult to represent these properties correctly, since there are often subtle, but important, ...

We exploit the main similarity between the aspect-oriented programming paradigm and the inter-object, scenario-based approach to specification in order to construct a new way of executing systems based on the latter. Specifically, we show how to compile ...

Developers of distributed systems routinely construct discrete-event simulations to help understand and evaluate the behavior of inter-component protocols. Simulations are abstract models of systems and their environments, capturing basic algorithmic ...

Pervasive context-aware software is an emerging kind of application. Many of these systems register parts of their context-aware logic in the middleware. On the other hand, most conventional testing techniques do not consider such kind of application ...

Unit test cases are focused and efficient. System tests are effective at exercising complex usage patterns. Differential unit tests (DUT) are a hybrid of unit and system tests. They are generated by carving the system components, while executing a ...

Improper management of software evolution, compounded by imprecise, and changing requirements, along with the "short time to market" requirement, commonly leads to a lack of up-to-date specifications. This can result in software that is characterized by ...

A method for extracting syntactic specifications from heap-manipulating code is described. The state of the heap is represented as an environment mapping each variable or field to a relational expression. A procedure is executed symbolically, obtaining ...