2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)最新文献

{"title":"FLeCCS: A Technique for Suggesting Fragment-Level Similar Co-change Candidates","authors":"Manishankar Mondal, C. Roy, B. Roy, Kevin A. Schneider","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00024","url":null,"abstract":"When a programmer changes a particular code fragment, the other similar code fragments in the code-base may also need to be changed together (i.e., co-changed) consistently to ensure that the software system remains consistent. Existing studies and tools apply clone detectors to identify these similar co-change candidates for a target code fragment. However, clone detectors suffer from a confounding configuration choice problem and it affects their accuracy in retrieving co-change candidates.In our research, we propose and empirically evaluate a lightweight co-change suggestion technique that can automatically suggest fragment level similar co-change candidates for a target code fragment using WA-DiSC (Weighted Average Dice–Sørensen Co-efficient) through a context-sensitive mining of the entire code-base. We apply our technique, FLeCCS (Fragment Level Co-change Candidate Suggester), on six subject systems written in three different programming languages (Java, C, and C#) and compare its performance with the existing state-of-the-art techniques. According to our experiment, our technique outperforms not only the existing code clone based techniques but also the association rule mining based techniques in detecting co-change candidates with a significantly higher accuracy (precision and recall). We also find that File Proximity Ranking performs significantly better than Similarity Extent Ranking when ranking the co-change candidates suggested by our proposed technique.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115771415","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":"Comprehending Spreadsheets: Which Strategies do Users Apply?","authors":"K. Hodnigg, Christian Macho, M. Pinzger, D. Jannach","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00044","url":null,"abstract":"Spreadsheets are a ubiquitous means of communication and decision making, and adequate comprehension is required for reading, interpretation as well as maintenance. Despite being around for forty years, only selected aspects of comprehension were studied, mainly focusing on error detection and correction, and largely disregarding a more holistic view on spreadsheet comprehension processes.In this paper, we provide the first steps towards a deeper understanding of how users approach comprehension through a user study. In this study, we tasked eight spreadsheet users to describe their thought processes while trying to familiarize themselves with a real-world spreadsheet. The transcripts of these eight think-aloud studies were then used to identify 16 comprehension indicators validated by three experts. With these categories, we set out to qualitatively identify frequent comprehension patterns that the participants applied to understand spreadsheets.Although the comprehension process is highly individual, we could identify frequently occurring patterns, such as assumptions can imply consolidations and realizations, and realizations often happen before contradictions. The results of this work can be used to design better tools that assist users in comprehending spreadsheets.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114863386","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":"Assessing Semantic Frames to Support Program Comprehension Activities","authors":"Arthur Marques, Giovanni Viviani, G. Murphy","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00011","url":null,"abstract":"Software developers often rely on natural language text that appears in software engineering artifacts to access critical information as they build and work on software systems. For example, developers access requirements documents to understand what to build, comments in source code to understand design decisions, answers to questions on Q&A sites to understand APIs, and so on. To aid software developers in accessing and using this natural language information, soft-ware engineering researchers often use techniques from natural language processing. In this paper, we explore whether frame semantics, a general linguistic approach, which has been used on requirements text, can also help address problems that occur when applying lexicon analysis based techniques to text associated with program comprehension activities. We assess the applicability of generic semantic frame parsing for this purpose, and based on the results, we propose SEFrame to tailor semantic frame parsing for program comprehension uses. We evaluate the correctness and robustness of the approach finding that SEFrame is correct in between 73% and 74% of the cases and that it can parse text from a variety of software artifacts used to support program comprehension. We describe how this approach could be used to enhance existing approaches to identify meaning on intention from software engineering texts.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"138 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116550091","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":"Detecting Inconsistent Thrown Exceptions","authors":"Lin Xu, Hao Zhong","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00045","url":null,"abstract":"Exception-handling is a critical mechanism in many programming languages. Although it is beneficial in many programming contexts, the bugs in this mechanism can lead to disastrous consequences. In the literature, researchers have proposed various approaches to detect the bugs in handling exceptions. Meanwhile, the thrown exceptions themselves can also be buggy, but to the best of our knowledge, no prior approach has ever been proposed to detect bugs in thrown exceptions, because it is even difficult for programmers to determine whether a thrown exception is buggy or not. In this paper, we propose the first automatic criterion (meta-oracle) to determine whether a thrown exception contains a bug. Our meta-oracle says that if the messages of two thrown exceptions are quite similar, the type of the two exceptions shall be the same. Based on this meta-oracle, we implement exMiner that is able to detect bugs in thrown exceptions. It introduces sequence mining to identify similar exception messages, and groups thrown exceptions by the patterns that are mined from their messages. From each group of exception messages, it detects the ones whose types are different as bugs in thrown exceptions. For the first time, exMiner detected three bugs from the latest versions of three Apache projects. We reported this new type of bugs to their developers, and all the bugs were confirmed and fixed.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115782286","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":"Students’ Misunderstanding of the Order of Evaluation in Conjoined Conditions","authors":"E. Wiese, Anna N. Rafferty, Garrett Moseke","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00055","url":null,"abstract":"Experts often use particular control flow structures to make their code easier to read and modify, such as using the logical operator AND to conjoin conditions rather than nesting separate if statements. Within Boolean expressions, experts take advantage of short-circuit evaluation by ordering their conditions to avoid errors (such as checking that an index is within the bounds of an array before examining the value at that index). How well do students understand these structures? We investigate students’ use and understanding of conjoined versus separate conditions within a larger assessment of 125 undergraduate students at the end of their second- and third-semester CS courses (in algorithms & data structures and introductory software engineering). The assessment asked students to: write code where an edge case error could be avoided with short-circuit evaluation, revise their code with nudges towards expert structure, and answer comprehension questions involving code tracing. When writing, students frequently forgot to check for a key edge case. When that case was included, the check was often separated in its own if-statement rather than conjoined with the other conditions. This could indicate a stylistic choice or a belief that the check had to be separated for functionality. Notably, students who included all necessary conditions rarely exhibited the error of ordering them incorrectly. However, with code comprehension, students demonstrated significant misunderstandings about the effects of condition ordering. Students were more accurate on comprehension tasks with nested ifs than conjoined conditions, and this effect was most pronounced when the ordering of the conditions would lead to errors. When conditions were conjoined in a single expression, only 35% of students recognized that checking a value at an index before checking that the index was in bounds would lead to an error. However, 54% of students recognized the problem when the conditions were separated into individual if-statements. This demonstrates a subtlety in code execution that intermediate students may not have mastered and emphasizes the challenges in assessing students’ understanding solely via the way they write code.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125989473","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":"Code Authors Hidden in File Revision Histories: An Empirical Study","authors":"Siyi Gong, Haojun Zhong","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00016","url":null,"abstract":"Although many programmers write their names in the comments of a source file, from such comments, it is unreliable to identify code authors, since the modifications of many programmers are not recorded. Even if they are recorded in a code repository, many authors are hidden in revision histories.The true authors of source files are important in many research topics. For example, when detecting plagiarism, if the authors of two source are overlapped, it becomes more challenging to determine plagiarism than the source files that are written by individual authors. As it is difficult to determine true authors of a source file, researchers typically use source files whose authors are already known (e.g., the source files from Google Code Jam), but such files are not many and less representative. Meanwhile, although some empirical studies touch code authors, to the best of our knowledge, no prior study has analyzed the characteristics of code authors that are hidden in revision histories. As a result, many research questions along with code authors are still open. For example, how many authors does a source file can have, and what are the proportions of contributions per source file, if they are written by more than one author?To answer the timely questions, in this paper, we conducted an empirical study on code authors that are hidden in revision histories. To support our study, we implemented a tool called CODA. By comparing the latest code lines with past commits, CODA identifies the true authors of all code lines. With its support, we analyzed 12,092 source files that were written by 506 programmers. Our study answers several interesting questions concerning code authors. For example, we find that 75.4% source files are written by multiple authors, and their contributions follow the famous 80/20 principle. These findings are useful to understand authors of source files in open source communities.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129846902","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":"Weighing the Evidence: On Relationship Types in Microservice Extraction","authors":"Lisa J. Kirby, Evelien Boerstra, Zachary J. C. Anderson, J. Rubin","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00041","url":null,"abstract":"The microservice-based architecture – a SOA-inspired principle of dividing systems into components that communicate with each other using language-agnostic APIs – has gained increased popularity in industry. Yet, migrating a monolithic application to microservices is a challenging task. A number of automated microservice extraction techniques have been proposed to help developers with the migration complexity. These techniques, at large, construct a graph-based representation of an application and cluster its elements into service candidates. The techniques vary by their decomposition goals and, subsequently, types of relationships between application elements that they consider – structural, semantic term similarity, and evolutionary – with each technique utilizing a fixed subset and weighting of these relationship types.In this paper, we perform a multi-method exploratory study with 10 industrial practitioners to investigate (1) the applicability and usefulness of different relationships types during the microservice extraction process and (2) expectations practitioners have for tools utilizing such relationships. Our results show that practitioners often need a \"what-if\" analysis tool that simultaneously considers multiple relationship types during the extraction process and that there is no fixed way to weight these relationships. Our study also identifies organization- and application-specific considerations that lead practitioners to prefer certain relationship types over others, e.g., the age of the codebase and languages spoken in the organization. It outlines possible strategies to help developers during the extraction process, e.g., the ability to iteratively filter and customize relationships.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"18 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120858912","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":"The Effect of a Block-based Language on Formula Comprehension in Spreadsheets","authors":"Bas Jansen, F. Hermans","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00035","url":null,"abstract":"The use of spreadsheets in industry is widespread. It is known that spreadsheets have an average life span of five years, and during this life span, they are used on average by thirteen different persons. Consequently, spreadsheets need maintenance, and knowledge about the spreadsheet needs to be transferred from one user to another. To minimize the risk of introducing new errors, a thorough understanding of the spreadsheet’s formulas is needed during maintenance and knowledge transfer tasks.Research on the use of block-based languages has shown that they positively affect the comprehension of program code. We hypothesize that using a block-based representation of a spreadsheet formula will positively affect formula comprehension.Hence, we extended XLBlocks, a block-based formula editor for spreadsheets, with the functionality to generate a block-based representation of an existing formula. We conduct a think-aloud study with twenty-one experienced spreadsheet users from industry and ask them to perform a set of spreadsheet comprehension tasks using XLBlocks. During an interview, we ask them, using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations framework, to reflect on the use of XLBlocks.We found that participants preferred to use the block-based representation of formulas when analyzing or explaining formulas or to implement non-trivial changes. Named function parameters and the absence of parentheses and commas make functions easier to understand. Furthermore, the visualization enables the user to separate smaller parts in the formula, which improves comprehension. Finally, the possibility to navigate from formula to formula makes it clear how formulas work together and improve the understanding of the spreadsheet as a whole.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134030785","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":"Predicting Crash Fault Residence via Simplified Deep Forest Based on A Reduced Feature Set","authors":"Kunsong Zhao, Jin Liu, Zhou Xu, Li Li, Meng Yan, Jiaojiao Yu, Yuxuan Zhou","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00031","url":null,"abstract":"The software inevitably encounters the crash, which will take developers a large amount of effort to find the fault causing the crash (short for crashing fault). Developing automatic methods to identify the residence of the crashing fault is a crucial activity for software quality assurance. Researchers have proposed methods to predict whether the crashing fault resides in the stack trace based on the features collected from the stack trace and faulty code, aiming at saving the debugging effort for developers. However, previous work usually neglected the feature preprocessing operation towards the crash data and only used traditional classification models. In this paper, we propose a novel crashing fault residence prediction framework, called ConDF, which consists of a consistency based feature subset selection method and a state-of-the-art deep forest model. More specifically, first, the feature selection method is used to obtain an optimal feature subset and reduce the feature dimension by reserving the representative features. Then, a simplified deep forest model is employed to build the classification model on the reduced feature set. The experiments on seven open source software projects show that our ConDF method performs significantly better than 17 baseline methods on three performance indicators.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133335779","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":"Towards improving architectural diagram consistency using system descriptors","authors":"Jalves Nicácio, Fábio Petrillo","doi":"10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC52881.2021.00047","url":null,"abstract":"Communication between practitioners is essential for the system’s quality in the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments consistently. Hence, the inconsistency of architectural diagrams can affect communication between practitioner and their understanding of systems. In this paper, we propose the use of system descriptors to improve deployment diagram consistency. We state two main hypotheses: (1) if an architectural diagram is generated from a valid system descriptor, then the diagram is consistent; (2) if a valid system descriptor is generated from an architectural diagram, then the diagram is consistent. We report a case study to explore our hypotheses. We constructed a system descriptor from the Netflix deployment diagram, and we applied our tool to generate a new architectural diagram. Finally, we compare the original and generated diagrams to evaluate our proposal. Our case study shows all Docker compose description elements can be graphically represented in the generated architectural diagram, and the generated diagram does not present inconsistent aspects of the original diagram. Thus, our preliminary results lead to further evaluation in controlled and empirical experiments to test our hypotheses.","PeriodicalId":288873,"journal":{"name":"2021 IEEE/ACM 29th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116724615","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}