Isolating crosscutting concerns in system software

This paper reports upon our experience in automatically migrating the crosscutting concerns of a large-scale software system, written in C, to an aspect-oriented implementation. We zoom in on one particular crosscutting concern, and show how detailed information about it is extracted from the source code, and how this information enables us to characterise this code and define an appropriate aspect automatically. Additionally, we compare the already existing solution to the aspect-oriented solution, and discuss advantages as well as disadvantages of both in terms of selected quality attributes. Our results show that automated migration is feasible, and can lead to significant improvements in source code qualit

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

Fine-Grained Static Detection of Obfuscation Transforms Using Ensemble-Learning and Semantic Reasoning

International audienceThe ability to efficiently detect the software protections used is at a prime to facilitate the selection and application of adequate deob-fuscation techniques. We present a novel approach that combines semantic reasoning techniques with ensemble learning classification for the purpose of providing a static detection framework for obfuscation transformations. By contrast to existing work, we provide a methodology that can detect multiple layers of obfuscation, without depending on knowledge of the underlying functionality of the training-set used. We also extend our work to detect constructions of obfuscation transformations, thus providing a fine-grained methodology. To that end, we provide several studies for the best practices of the use of machine learning techniques for a scalable and efficient model. According to our experimental results and evaluations on obfuscators such as Tigress and OLLVM, our models have up to 91% accuracy on state-of-the-art obfuscation transformations. Our overall accuracies for their constructions are up to 100%

Visualization and analysis of software clones

Code clones are identical or similar fragments of code in a software system. Simple copy-paste programming practices of developers, reusing existing code fragments instead of implementing from the scratch, limitations of both programming languages and developers are the primary reasons behind code cloning. Despite the maintenance implications of clones, it is not possible to conclude that cloning is harmful because there are also benefits in using them (e.g. faster and independent development). As a result, researchers at least agree that clones need to be analyzed before aggressively refactoring them. Although a large number of state-of-the-art clone detectors are available today, handling raw clone data is challenging due to the textual nature and large volume. To address this issue, we propose a framework for large-scale clone analysis and develop a maintenance support environment based on the framework called VisCad. To manage the large volume of clone data, VisCad employs the Visual Information Seeking Mantra: overview first, zoom and filter, then provide details-on-demand. With VisCad users can analyze and identify distinctive code clones through a set of visualization techniques, metrics covering different clone relations and data filtering operations. The loosely coupled architecture of VisCad allows users to work with any clone detection tool that reports source-coordinates of the found clones. This yields the opportunity to work with the clone detectors of choice, which is important because each clone detector has its own strengths and weaknesses. In addition, we extend the support for clone evolution analysis, which is important to understand the cause and effect of changes at the clone level during the evolution of a software system. Such information can be used to make software maintenance decisions like when to refactor clones. We propose and implement a set of visualizations that can allow users to analyze the evolution of clones from a coarse grain to a fine grain level. Finally, we use VisCad to extract both spatial and temporal clone data to predict changes to clones in a future release/revision of the software, which can be used to rank clone classes as another means of handling a large volume of clone data. We believe that VisCad makes clone comprehension easier and it can be used as a test-bed to further explore code cloning, necessary in building a successful clone management system

Achievements, open problems and challenges for search based software testing

Search Based Software Testing (SBST) formulates testing as an optimisation problem, which can be attacked using computational search techniques from the field of Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE). We present an analysis of the SBST research agenda, focusing on the open problems and challenges of testing non-functional properties, in particular a topic we call 'Search Based Energy Testing' (SBET), Multi-objective SBST and SBST for Test Strategy Identification. We conclude with a vision of FIFIVERIFY tools, which would automatically find faults, fix them and verify the fixes. We explain why we think such FIFIVERIFY tools constitute an exciting challenge for the SBSE community that already could be within its reach

Project-Team RMoD (Analyses and Language Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution) 2017 Activity Report

This is the yearly report of the RMOD team (http://rmod.inria.fr/). A good way to understand what we are doing