Journal of Computer Languages最新文献

{"title":"A test amplification bot for Pharo/Smalltalk","authors":"Mehrdad Abdi ,&nbsp;Henrique Rocha ,&nbsp;Alexandre Bergel ,&nbsp;Serge Demeyer","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101255","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101255","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Test amplification exploits the knowledge embedded in an existing test suite to strengthen it. A typical test amplification technique transforms the initial tests into additional test methods that increase the mutation coverage. Although past research demonstrated the benefits, additional steps need to be taken to incorporate test amplifiers in the everyday workflow of developers. This paper describes a proof-of-concept bot integrating <span>Small-Amp</span> with <span>GitHub-Actions</span>. The bot decides for itself which tests to amplify and does so within a limited time budget. To integrate the bot into the <span>GitHub-Actions</span> workflow, we incorporate three special-purpose features: (i) prioritization (to fit the process within a given time budget), (ii) sharding (to split lengthy tests into smaller chunks), and (iii) sandboxing (to make the amplifier crash-resilient). We evaluate our approach by installing the proof-of-concept extension of <span>Small-Amp</span> on five open-source projects deployed on GitHub. Our results show that a test amplification bot is feasible at a project level by integrating it into the build system. Moreover, we quantify the impact of prioritization, sharding, and sandboxing so that other test amplifiers may benefit from these special-purpose features. Our proof-of-concept demonstrates that the entry barrier for adopting test amplification can be significantly lowered.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101255"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138565824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fuzzing-based grammar learning from a minimal set of seed inputs","authors":"Hannes Sochor ,&nbsp;Flavio Ferrarotti ,&nbsp;Daniela Kaufmann","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101252","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>To be effective, a fuzzer needs to generate inputs that are well formed, so that they are not outright rejected by the Software Under Test (SUT) and can thus detect meaningful bugs. Grammar based fuzzers<span><span> solve this problem, but they obviously require a grammar of the input language accepted by the SUT. Many times such grammar is unknown. Therefore, different black- and white-box algorithms have been proposed for learning them from SUTs. Black-box algorithms rely only on membership queries, but need access to carefully crafted well formed inputs in order to obtain good results. White-box algorithms require access to the source code and generally produce grammars with higher precision and recall, but at the expense of working only for specific programming languages and libraries. We propose a new algorithm and show through extensive experimentation that it can learn grammars from recursive descendent parsers with consistently high levels of both, recall and precision. Notably, this result was obtained starting with a couple of arbitrary seed inputs and includes evaluations with sophisticated languages such as </span>Java Script Object Notation<span> (JSON). Different to other state of the art white-box approaches, our method does not require sophisticated program analysis techniques such as dynamic tainting or symbolic execution. In fact, the experiments confirm that our method performs extremely well with just a (standard) generic Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the </span></span></span>parsing program as input. The core of our method uses fuzzing techniques combined with fundamental theoretical results on grammar learning. Compared to other white-box approaches, ours is not tied to specific programming languages and tools, and thus can be easily ported. Regarding performance, we have shown that our algorithm works well in practice and that, under reasonable assumptions, its worst-case complexity is polynomial (with low exponents) w.r.t. time and space requirements.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101252"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138430607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"AI-based clustering of similar issues in GitHub’s repositories","authors":"Hamzeh Eyal Salman","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101257","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101257","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Issues are highly prevalent on GitHub due to the increasing scale of its software repositories. These issues are submitted to the issue tracking system for several reasons: reporting a bug, asking a question, or other maintenance activities. The attractive repositories on Github receive a large number of issues daily. Assigning similar issues individually to different developers for validating and fixing introduces inconsistencies when asynchronously independent developers fix them, in addition to slowing the fixing process. However, grouping similar issues into clusters and assigning each cluster to the same and appropriate developer/team speeds up the fixing process. In this paper, a machine learning algorithm-based approach has been proposed to support issue management on GitHub by grouping similar issues together. For validity, the proposed approach was applied to 13 software components from different and large repositories. Findings reveal that the proposed approach identifies similar clusters of issues with promising results using widely used evaluation measures in this subject: Precision, Recall, and F-measure.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101257"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139095633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"LEV4REC: A feature-based approach to engineering RSSEs","authors":"Claudio Di Sipio,&nbsp;Juri Di Rocco,&nbsp;Davide Di Ruscio,&nbsp;Phuong T. Nguyen","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101256","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101256","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>To facilitate the development of recommender systems<span> for software engineering (RSSEs), this paper introduces LEV4REC, a model-driven approach supporting all RSSE development stages, from design to deployment. It enables parameter fine-tuning, enhancing the developer and </span></span>user experience by using a dedicated feature model for early configuration. We evaluated LEV4REC by applying it to two existing RSSEs based on different algorithms.</p><p>Results demonstrate its ability to recreate suitable recommendations and outperform a state-of-the-art approach. Qualitative findings from a focus group study further validate LEV4REC’s effectiveness, while indicating the need for extension points to support additional systems.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101256"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138741160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Solvi: A visual constraint modeling tool","authors":"Xu Zhu ,&nbsp;Miguel A. Nacenta ,&nbsp;Özgür Akgün ,&nbsp;Daniel Zenkovitch","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101242","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Discrete constraint problems surface often in everyday life. Teachers might group students with complex considerations and hospital administrators need to produce staff rosters. Constraint programming (CP) provides techniques to efficiently find solutions. However, there remains a key challenge: these techniques are still largely inaccessible because expressing constraint problems requires sophisticated programming and logic skills. In this work we contribute a language and tool that leverage knowledge of how non-experts conceptualize problems to facilitate the expression of constraint models. Additionally, we report the results of a study surveying the advantages and remaining challenges towards making CP accessible to the wider public.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101242"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590118423000527/pdfft?md5=42dcd60e8822ed624ec930252ba9fd7e&pid=1-s2.0-S2590118423000527-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138435915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Improved software fault prediction using new code metrics and machine learning algorithms","authors":"Manpreet Singh,&nbsp;Jitender Kumar Chhabra","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101253","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101253","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Many code metrics exist for bug prediction. However, these metrics are based on the trivial count of code properties and are not sufficient. This research article proposes three new code metrics based on class complexity, coupling, and cohesion to fill the gap. The Promise repository metrics suite's complexity, coupling, and cohesion metrics are replaced by the proposed metrics, and a new metric suite is generated. Experiments show that the proposed metrics suite gives more than 2 % improvement in AUC and precision and approximately 1.5 % in f1-score and recall with fewer code metrics than the existing metrics suite.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101253"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138508597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Supporting model-based safety analysis for safety-critical IoT systems","authors":"Felicien Ihirwe ,&nbsp;Davide Di Ruscio ,&nbsp;Katia Di Blasio ,&nbsp;Simone Gianfranceschi ,&nbsp;Alfonso Pierantonio","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101243","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Dependability is regarded as the ability of the system to provide services that can be trusted within a specific period. As the complexity and heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) systems rise, so does the possibility of errors and failure. Early safety analysis not only reduces the cost of late failure but also makes it easier to trace and determine the source of the failure beforehand in case something goes wrong. In this paper, we present an early safety analysis approach based on Failure-Logic Analysis (FLA) and Fault-Tree Analysis (FTA) for safety-critical IoT systems. The safety analysis infrastructure, supported by the CHESSIoT tool, takes into account the system-level physical architecture model annotated with the component’s failure logic properties to perform different kinds of automated failure analyses. In addition to its ability to generate the system Fault-Trees (FTs), the new FTA analysis approach automatically performs qualitative and quantitative analyses which include the elimination of redundant events, unnecessary failure paths, as well as automatic probabilistic calculation of the undesired events. To assess the effectiveness of the approach, a comparative study between our propose approach with 19 existing approaches in both academia and industry was conducted showcasing its contribution to the state of the art. Finally, a Patient Monitoring System (PMS) use case has been developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the supporting CHESSIoT tool, and the results are thoroughly presented.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101243"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138435916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Requirements development for IoT systems with UCM4IoT","authors":"Paul Boutot,&nbsp;Mirza Rehenuma Tabassum,&nbsp;Abdul Abedin,&nbsp;Sadaf Mustafiz","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101251","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p><span>The engineering of IoT (Internet of Things) systems brings about various challenges due to the inherent complexities associated with such adaptive systems. Addressing the adaptive nature of IoT systems in the early stages of the development life cycle<span> is essential for developing a complete and precise system specification. In this paper, we propose a use case-based modelling language<span>, UCM4IoT, to support requirements elicitation and specification of IoT systems. UCM4IoT takes into account the heterogeneity of IoT systems and provides domain-specific language constructs to model the different facets of IoT systems. The language also incorporates the notion of exceptional situations and adaptive system behaviour. Our language is supported with a textual modelling environment to assist modellers in writing use cases. The environment supports syntax-directed editing, validation of use case models, and requirements analysis. The proposed language and tool is demonstrated and evaluated with two case studies: smart store system and smart </span></span></span>fire alarm system.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"78 ","pages":"Article 101251"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138489706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Programming microcontrollers through high-level abstractions: The OMicroB project","authors":"Steven Varoumas ,&nbsp;Basile Pesin ,&nbsp;Benoît Vaugon ,&nbsp;Emmanuel Chailloux","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101228","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101228","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this paper, we present an approach for programming microcontrollers that provides more expressivity and safety than the low-level language approach traditionally used to program such devices. To this end, we provide various abstraction layers (abstraction of the microcontroller, of the electronic components of the circuit, and of concurrency) which, while being adapted to the scarce resources of the hardware, offer high-level programming traits for the development of embedded applications. The various presented abstractions make use of an OCaml virtual machine, called OMicroB, which is able to run on devices with limited resources. These take advantage of the expressivity and safety of the OCaml language (parameterized modules, advanced type system). Its extensibility allows to define a synchronous extension to manage concurrency while keeping a good level of efficiency at execution. We illustrate the value of our work on both entertainment applications and embedded software examples.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"77 ","pages":"Article 101228"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49484389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Correctness of IoT-based systems: From a DSL to a mechanised analysis","authors":"Christian Attiogbé ,&nbsp;Jérôme Rocheteau","doi":"10.1016/j.cola.2023.101239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2023.101239","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Systems based on the Internet of Things are being widely used in industrial areas such as smart manufacturing, in smart health monitoring, in entertainment and in home automation application. They impact more and more every day life. Ensuring their correct construction, their well functioning and their reliability is an important issue for some of these systems which can be critical in case of dysfunction. The main requirements on physical architectures and control software are common to most of IoT-based systems. We propose, on the basis of the common architectural properties and the behaviour of IoT-based systems, the rigorous analysis of their intrinsic consistency properties; specific properties may also be considered and analysed.</p><p>We propose a model-based approach to help in systematically modelling and analysing these systems. Our approach focuses both on the formalisation of the model of the targeted systems for their rigorous analysis purpose, and on the design of a modelling language as a domain specific language dedicated to describe IoT-based systems. We build a generic formal model which captures the common features and the properties required for any IoT-based system. This formal model is then a parametrised model where the parameters are the specific data and properties of a given system. The proposed DSL, named <span><math><mrow><mi>τ</mi><mi>i</mi><mi>l</mi><mi>a</mi></mrow></math></span> , is used to describe an IoT system which will be submitted to formal analysis of correctness. <span><math><mrow><mi>τ</mi><mi>i</mi><mi>l</mi><mi>a</mi></mrow></math></span> is a tiny declarative language, extensible, based on a library of building component blocks available as types.</p><p>In fact, a description in <span><math><mrow><mi>τ</mi><mi>i</mi><mi>l</mi><mi>a</mi></mrow></math></span> helps to model a system, by collecting the parameters necessary to instantiate the generic formal model. Therefore the analysis requirements are based on the generic model. We experimented our approach using the proposed <span><math><mrow><mi>τ</mi><mi>i</mi><mi>l</mi><mi>a</mi></mrow></math></span> DSL for modelling and the Event-B framework for the formal analysis. The overall proposed approach is accompanied by a model editor generated to assist users in modelling an application and a prototype tool we have developed to assist the users in analysing their systems. Examples are provided.</p><p>The generic formal model is extensible; it may be profitably adapted to more general hybrid or cyber–physical systems. Moreover, our generic model is independent of the target formal modelling tools; it may be implemented in various other formal analysis environments.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48552,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Computer Languages","volume":"77 ","pages":"Article 101239"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50188351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}