G. Salvaneschi, Sven Amann, Sebastian Proksch, M. Mezini
{"title":"An empirical study on program comprehension with reactive programming","authors":"G. Salvaneschi, Sven Amann, Sebastian Proksch, M. Mezini","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635895","url":null,"abstract":"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 studied for a long time. Over the years, researchers have enriched reactive languages with more powerful abstractions, embedded these abstractions into mainstream languages – including object-oriented languages – and applied reactive programming to several domains, like GUIs, animations, Web applications, robotics, and sensor networks. However, an important assumption behind this line of research – that, beside other advantages, reactive programming makes a wide class of otherwise cumbersome applications more comprehensible – has never been evaluated. In this paper, we present the design and the results of the first empirical study that evaluates the effect of reactive programming on comprehensibility compared to the traditional object-oriented style with the Observer design pattern. Results confirm the conjecture that comprehensibility is enhanced by reactive programming. In the experiment, the reactive programming group significantly outperforms the other group.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123959560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Omen+: a precise dynamic deadlock detector for multithreaded Java libraries","authors":"Malavika Samak, M. Ramanathan","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2661670","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2661670","url":null,"abstract":"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 associated thread interleavings. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of OMEN+ that takes a multithreaded library as the input and detects true deadlocks in a scalable manner. We achieve this by automatically synthesizing relevant multithreaded tests and analyze the associated execution traces using a precise deadlock detector. We validate the usefulness of OMEN+ by applying it on many multithreaded Java libraries and detect a number of deadlocks even in documented thread-safe libraries. The tool is available for free download at http://www.csa.iisc.ernet.in/~sss/tool/omenplus.html.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"142 49","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113939751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the efficiency of automated testing","authors":"Marcel Böhme, Soumya Paul","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635923","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of automated program testing is to gain confidence about a program's correctness by sampling its input space. The sampling process can be either systematic or random. For every systematic testing technique the sampling is informed by the analysis of some program artefacts, like the specification, the source code (e.g., to achieve coverage), or even faulty versions of the program (e.g., mutation testing). This analysis incurs some cost. In contrast, random testing is unsystematic and does not sustain any analysis cost. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical efficiency of systematic versus random testing. First, we mathematically model the most effective systematic testing technique S_0 in which every sampled test input strictly increases the \"degree of confidence\" and is subject to the analysis cost c. Note that the efficiency of S_0 depends on c. Specifically, if we increase c, we also increase the time it takes S_0 to establish the same degree of confidence. So, there exists a maximum analysis cost beyond which R is generally more efficient than S_0. Given that we require the confidence that the program works correctly for x% of its input, we prove an upper bound on c of S_0, beyond which R is more efficient on the average. We also show that this bound depends asymptotically only on x. For instance, let R take 10ms time to sample one test input; to establish that the program works correctly for 90% of its input, S_0 must take less than 41ms to sample one test input. Otherwise, R is expected to establish the 90%-degree of confidence earlier. We prove similar bounds on the cost if the software tester is interested in revealing as many errors as possible in a given time span.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126597379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Binkley, N. Gold, M. Harman, Syed S. Islam, J. Krinke, S. Yoo
{"title":"ORBS: language-independent program slicing","authors":"D. Binkley, N. Gold, M. Harman, Syed S. Islam, J. Krinke, S. Yoo","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635893","url":null,"abstract":"Current slicing techniques cannot handle systems written in multiple programming languages. Observation-Based Slicing (ORBS) is a language-independent slicing technique capable of slicing multi-language systems, including systems which contain (third party) binary components. A potential slice obtained through repeated statement deletion is validated by observing the behaviour of the program: if the slice and original program behave the same under the slicing criterion, the deletion is accepted. The resulting slice is similar to a dynamic slice. We evaluate five variants of ORBS on ten programs of different sizes and languages showing that it is less expensive than similar existing techniques. We also evaluate it on bash and four other systems to demonstrate feasible large-scale operation in which a parallelised ORBS needs up to 82% less time when using four threads. The results show that an ORBS slicer is simple to construct, effective at slicing, and able to handle systems written in multiple languages without specialist analysis tools.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127642495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ferdian Thung, Tien-Duy B. Le, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, D. Lo
{"title":"BugLocalizer: integrated tool support for bug localization","authors":"Ferdian Thung, Tien-Duy B. Le, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, D. Lo","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2661678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2661678","url":null,"abstract":"To manage bugs that appear in a software, developers often make use of a bug tracking system such as Bugzilla. Users can report bugs that they encounter in such a system. Whenever a user reports a new bug report, developers need to read the summary and description of the bug report and manually locate the buggy files based on this information. This manual process is often time consuming and tedious. Thus, a number of past studies have proposed bug localization techniques to automatically recover potentially buggy files from bug reports. Unfortunately, none of these techniques are integrated to bug tracking systems and thus it hinders their adoption by practitioners. To help disseminate research in bug localization to practitioners, we develop a tool named BugLocalizer, which is implemented as a Bugzilla extension and builds upon a recently proposed bug localization technique. Our tool extracts texts from summary and description fields of a bug report and source code files. It then computes similarities of the bug report with source code files to find the buggy files. Developers can use our tool online from a Bugzilla web interface by providing a link to a git source code repository and specifying the version of the repository to be analyzed. We have released our tool publicly in GitHub, which is available at: https://github.com/smagsmu/buglocalizer. We have also provided a demo video, which can be accessed at: http://youtu.be/iWHaLNCUjBY.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"26 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121042431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"FlowTwist: efficient context-sensitive inside-out taint analysis for large codebases","authors":"Johannes Lerch, Ben Hermann, E. Bodden, M. Mezini","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635878","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635878","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past years, widely used platforms such as the Java Class Library have been under constant attack through vulnerabilities that involve a combination of two taint-analysis problems: an integrity problem allowing attackers to trigger sensitive operations within the platform, and a confidentiality problem allowing the attacker to retrieve sensitive information or pointers from the results of those operations. While existing static taint analyses are good at solving either of those problems, we show that they scale prohibitively badly when being applied to situations that require the exploitation of both an integrity and confidentiality problem in combination. The main problem is the huge attack surface of libraries such as the Java Class Library, which exposes thousands of methods potentially controllable by an attacker. In this work we thus present FlowTwist, a novel taint-analysis approach that works inside-out, i.e., tracks data flows from potentially vulnerable calls to the outer level of the API which the attacker might control. This inside-out analysis requires a careful, context-sensitive coordination of both a backward and a forward taint analysis. In this work, we expose a design of the analysis approach based on the IFDS algorithm, and explain several extensions to IFDS that enable not only this coordination but also a helpful reporting of error situations to security analysts. Experiments with the Java Class Library show that, while a simple forward taint-analysis approach does not scale even with much machine power, FlowTwist's algorithm is able to fully analyze the library within 10 minutes.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121321054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning to rank relevant files for bug reports using domain knowledge","authors":"Xin Ye, Razvan C. Bunescu, Chang Liu","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635874","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635874","url":null,"abstract":"When a new bug report is received, developers usually need to reproduce the bug and perform code reviews to find the cause, a process that can be tedious and time consuming. A tool for ranking all the source files of a project with respect to how likely they are to contain the cause of the bug would enable developers to narrow down their search and potentially could lead to a substantial increase in productivity. This paper introduces an adaptive ranking approach that leverages domain knowledge through functional decompositions of source code files into methods, API descriptions of library components used in the code, the bug-fixing history, and the code change history. Given a bug report, the ranking score of each source file is computed as a weighted combination of an array of features encoding domain knowledge, where the weights are trained automatically on previously solved bug reports using a learning-to-rank technique. We evaluated our system on six large scale open source Java projects, using the before-fix version of the project for every bug report. The experimental results show that the newly introduced learning-to-rank approach significantly outperforms two recent state-of-the-art methods in recommending relevant files for bug reports. In particular, our method makes correct recommendations within the top 10 ranked source files for over 70% of the bug reports in the Eclipse Platform and Tomcat projects.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129012322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Architecture challenges for internal software ecosystems: a large-scale industry case study","authors":"K. Schultis, Christoph Elsner, D. Lohmann","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2635876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635876","url":null,"abstract":"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 decentralized software projects that involve various internal, yet self-contained organizational units. However, this intra-organizational decentralization causes architecture challenges that must be understood to reason about suitable architectural measures. We present an in-depth case study on collaboration and architecture challenges in two of these large-scale software projects at Siemens. We performed a total of 46 hours of semi-structured interviews with 17 leading software architects from all involved organizational units. Our major findings are: (1) three collaboration models on a continuum that ranges from high to low coupling, (2) a classification of architecture challenges, together with (3) a qualitative and quantitative exposure of the identified recurring issues along each collaboration model. Our study results provide valuable insights for both industry and academia: Practitioners that find themselves in one of the collaboration models can use empirical evidence on challenges to make informed decisions about counteractive measures. Researchers can focus their attention on challenges faced by practitioners to make software engineering more effective.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116337045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Data hard with a vengeance (invited talk)","authors":"Thomas Zimmermann","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2684431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2684431","url":null,"abstract":"Action flicks and the analysis of software data in industry have more in common than you think. Both action heroes and development teams are on tight deadlines to save the day. Getting wrong information can lead to disastrous outcomes. In this talk, I will share experiences from my six years of research in the Empirical Software Engineering Group working with engineers towards sound data-driven decision about software.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"120 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116368725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Improving the software testing skills of novices during onboarding through social transparency","authors":"Raphael Pham","doi":"10.1145/2635868.2666604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2666604","url":null,"abstract":"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 testing skills has already been recognized. Companies allocate valuable resources and invest time and money in different onboarding strategies to introduce new hires to the organization’s testing practices. However, if the lack of testing skills is not addressed properly, the new hire is left to her own devices. This hinders her in becoming a high-quality engineer for the software company. This thesis proposes to improve the onboarding strategies with traits of social transparency in order to specifically address testing issues of inexperienced new hires. Social transparency has been shown to influence the testing behavior of development teams on a social coding site. An environment that is open for discussion helps newcomers to understand and adapt a team’s testing culture. Tailoring the onboarding process to better address testing skills of new hires makes it more effective and more efficient. This reduces the danger of carrying new hire’s testing deficits into commercial software development.","PeriodicalId":250543,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering","volume":"12 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114109225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}