Conference Virtualization

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, conference virtualization has happened, is happening, and will happen for the recent past, ongoing, and upcoming periods, respectively. An ongoing example of conference virtualization is ICSE 2020, the largest conference in software engineering. ACM has recently formed the ACM Presidential Task Force on What Conferences Can Do to Replace Faceto-Face Meetings; in May 2020, this task force released a guide to best practices on virtual conferences (https://www.acm.org/virtual-conferences). The availability of videoconferencing and/or Webinar systems such as Zoom has made online live presentations of accepted conference papers easy and low cost. One may wonder whether the current technology and platform availability for live presentations can facilitate some innovations of disseminating journal papers, going beyond the current common practice of partnership between journals and conferences, e.g., journal-first papers. For example, a journal may consider organizing a virtual journal summit every year or every half of a year for authors of accepted or published papers in that journal to present their papers in an online live manner. Indeed, community discussion is needed before these kinds of innovations are put into action. We welcome your thoughts on possible innovations of disseminating journal papers (especially in the face of conference virtualization), and these innovations’ potential pros and cons. This issue contains two papers. In the first paper, Lucas R. Andrade, Patricia D. L. Machado, and Wilkerson. L. Andrade address the problem of predicting the fault detection capability of a test suite. It has previously been observed that although code coverage is often seen as being important, the actual coverage achieved by a test suite is a poor predictor of effectiveness. To address this, recent work has introduced metrics (forms of Operational Coverage) that combine code coverage with information from an operational profile that models the expected usage of the system. This paper reports on the outcomes of a case study that considered 46 versions of a proprietary system. In order to provide an estimate of the effectiveness of a test suite, the authors used the number of post-release bugs reported (the fewer found, the more effective the test suite). Interestingly, it was found that there was a negative correlation between measures of test suite effectiveness with both versions of statement coverage but that the correlation was stronger with operational statement coverage. (Recommended by Lori L. Pollock). In the second paper, Yanqiang Liu, Fangge Yan, Mingyuan Xia, Zhengwei Qi, and Xue Liu present TimelyRep, an efficient and deterministic replay tool for web-enabled mobile applications. TimelyRep achieves deterministic replay of program states and low replay delays in face of the high input rate of mobile interaction. In particular, TimelyRep includes a mechanism for delivering an HTTP response stream with deterministic sequence, contents and latencies, without requiring modification of the browser core or the OS. TimelyRep also includes a mechanism to control replay delays in the JavaScript space, applicable for both the mobile web embeddings and traditional web browsers. This paper reports on an evaluation with two real-world web game applications with complicated non-determinism and intensive user inputs. The evaluation results show that TimelyRep is useful for recreating program bugs and maintaining low delays for touch-intensive web games. (Recommended by Robert Hierons).