Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

Semantic Web technologies in software engineering

Over the years, the software engineering community has developed various tools to support the specification, development, and maintainance of software. Many of these tools use proprietary data formats to store artifacts which hamper interoperability. However, the Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. Ontologies are used define the concepts in the domain of discourse and their relationships and as such provide the formal vocabulary applications use to exchange data. Beside the Web, the technologies developed for the Semantic Web have proven to be useful also in other domains, especially when data is exchanged between applications from different parties. Software engineering is one of these domains in which recent research shows that Semantic Web technologies are able to reduce the barriers of proprietary data formats and enable interoperability. In this tutorial, we present Semantic Web technologies and their application in software engineering. We discuss the current status of ontologies for software entities, bug reports, or change requests, as well as semantic representations for software and its documentation. This way, architecture, design, code, or test models can be shared across application boundaries enabling a seamless integration of engineering results

Model Driven Mutation Applied to Adaptative Systems Testing

Dynamically Adaptive Systems modify their behav- ior and structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment and according to an adaptation logic. Critical sys- tems increasingly incorporate dynamic adaptation capabilities; examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems. In this paper, we focus on mutation testing of the adaptation logic. We propose a fault model for adaptation logics that classifies faults into environmental completeness and adaptation correct- ness. Since there are several adaptation logic languages relying on the same underlying concepts, the fault model is expressed independently from specific adaptation languages. Taking benefit from model-driven engineering technology, we express these common concepts in a metamodel and define the operational semantics of mutation operators at this level. Mutation is applied on model elements and model transformations are used to propagate these changes to a given adaptation policy in the chosen formalism. Preliminary results on an adaptive web server highlight the difficulty of killing mutants for adaptive systems, and thus the difficulty of generating efficient tests.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, Mutation Analysis Workshop (Mutation 2011), Berlin : Allemagne (2011

Tortoise: Interactive System Configuration Repair

System configuration languages provide powerful abstractions that simplify managing large-scale, networked systems. Thousands of organizations now use configuration languages, such as Puppet. However, specifications written in configuration languages can have bugs and the shell remains the simplest way to debug a misconfigured system. Unfortunately, it is unsafe to use the shell to fix problems when a system configuration language is in use: a fix applied from the shell may cause the system to drift from the state specified by the configuration language. Thus, despite their advantages, configuration languages force system administrators to give up the simplicity and familiarity of the shell. This paper presents a synthesis-based technique that allows administrators to use configuration languages and the shell in harmony. Administrators can fix errors using the shell and the technique automatically repairs the higher-level specification written in the configuration language. The approach (1) produces repairs that are consistent with the fix made using the shell; (2) produces repairs that are maintainable by minimizing edits made to the original specification; (3) ranks and presents multiple repairs when relevant; and (4) supports all shells the administrator may wish to use. We implement our technique for Puppet, a widely used system configuration language, and evaluate it on a suite of benchmarks under 42 repair scenarios. The top-ranked repair is selected by humans 76% of the time and the human-equivalent repair is ranked 1.31 on average.Comment: Published version in proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 201

Achieving Cost-Effective Software Reliability Through Self-Healing

Heterogeneity, mobility, complexity and new application domains raise new software reliability issues that cannot be met cost-effectively only with classic software engineering approaches. Self-healing systems can successfully address these problems, thus increasing software reliability while reducing maintenance costs. Self-healing systems must be able to automatically identify runtime failures, locate faults, and find a way to bring the system back to an acceptable behavior. This paper discusses the challenges underlying the construction of self-healing systems with particular focus on functional failures, and presents a set of techniques to build software systems that can automatically heal such failures. It introduces techniques to automatically derive assertions to effectively detect functional failures, locate the faults underlying the failures, and identify sequences of actions alternative to the failing sequence to bring the system back to an acceptable behavior