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

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

A Survey of the Selenium Ecosystem

Selenium is often considered the de-facto standard framework for end-to-end web testing nowadays. It allows practitioners to drive web browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera) in an automated fashion using different language bindings (such as Java, Python, or JavaScript, among others). The term ecosystem, referring to the open-source software domain, includes various components, tools, and other interrelated elements sharing the same technological background. This article presents a descriptive survey aimed to understand how the community uses Selenium and its ecosystem. This survey is structured in seven categories: Selenium foundations, test development, system under test, test infrastructure, other frameworks, community, and personal experience. In light of the current state of Selenium, we analyze future challenges and opportunities around it.This work has been supported by the European Commission under the H2020 project "MICADO" (GA-822717), by the Government of Spain through the project "BugBirth" (RTI2018-101963-B-100), by the Regional Government of Madrid (CM) through the project "EDGEDATA-CM" (P2018/TCS-4499) cofunded by FSE & FEDER, and by the project "Analytics using sensor data for FlatCity" (MINECO/ERDF, EU) funded in part by the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) under Grant TIN2016-77158-C4-1-R and in part by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

Simulations on Consumer Tests: Systematic Evaluation of Tolerance Ranges by Model-Based Generation of Simulation Scenarios

Context: Since 2014 several modern cars were rated regarding the performances of their active safety systems at the European New Car Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP). Nowadays, consumer tests play a significant role for the OEM's series development with worldwide perspective, because a top rating is needed to underline the worthiness of active safety features from the customers' point of view. Furthermore, EuroNCAP already published their roadmap 2020 in which they outline further extensions in today's testing and rating procedures that will aggravate the current requirements addressed to those systems. Especially Autonomous Emergency Braking/Forward Collision Warning systems (AEB/FCW) are going to face a broader field of application as pedestrian detection or two-way traffic scenarios. Objective: This work focuses on the systematic generation of test scenarios concentrating on specific parameters that can vary within certain tolerance ranges like the lateral position of the vehicle-under-test (VUT) and its test velocity for example. It is of high interest to examine the effect of the tolerance ranges on the braking points in different test cases representing different trajectories and velocities because they will influence significantly a later scoring during the assessments and thus the safety abilities of the regarding car. Method: We present a formal model using a graph to represent the allowed variances based on the relevant points in time. Now, varying velocities of the VUT will be added to the model while the vehicle is approaching a target vehicle. The derived trajectories were used as test cases for a simulation environment. Selecting interesting test cases and processing them with the simulation environment, the influence on the system's performance of different test parameters will be investigated.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, Fahrerassistenzsysteme und Integrierte Sicherheit, VDI Berichte 2014, pp. 403-41

Automating Method Naming with Context-Aware Prompt-Tuning

Method names are crucial to program comprehension and maintenance. Recently, many approaches have been proposed to automatically recommend method names and detect inconsistent names. Despite promising, their results are still sub-optimal considering the three following drawbacks: 1) These models are mostly trained from scratch, learning two different objectives simultaneously. The misalignment between two objectives will negatively affect training efficiency and model performance. 2) The enclosing class context is not fully exploited, making it difficult to learn the abstract function of the method. 3) Current method name consistency checking methods follow a generate-then-compare process, which restricts the accuracy as they highly rely on the quality of generated names and face difficulty measuring the semantic consistency. In this paper, we propose an approach named AUMENA to AUtomate MEthod NAming tasks with context-aware prompt-tuning. Unlike existing deep learning based approaches, our model first learns the contextualized representation(i.e., class attributes) of PL and NL through the pre-training model, then fully exploits the capacity and knowledge of large language model with prompt-tuning to precisely detect inconsistent method names and recommend more accurate names. To better identify semantically consistent names, we model the method name consistency checking task as a two-class classification problem, avoiding the limitation of previous similarity-based consistency checking approaches. The experimental results reflect that AUMENA scores 68.6%, 72.0%, 73.6%, 84.7% on four datasets of method name recommendation, surpassing the state-of-the-art baseline by 8.5%, 18.4%, 11.0%, 12.0%, respectively. And our approach scores 80.8% accuracy on method name consistency checking, reaching an 5.5% outperformance. All data and trained models are publicly available.Comment: Accepted by ICPC-202

IETF standardization in the field of the internet of things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, a FWO postdoc grant for Eli De Poorter and a VLIR PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq