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

Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality

This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)

Search-based amorphous slicing

Amorphous slicing is an automated source code extraction technique with applications in many areas of software engineering, including comprehension, reuse, testing and reverse engineering. Algorithms for syntax-preserving slicing are well established, but amorphous slicing is harder because it requires arbitrary transformation; finding good general purpose amorphous slicing algorithms therefore remains as hard as general program transformation. In this paper we show how amorphous slices can be computed using search techniques. The paper presents results from a set of experiments designed to explore the application of genetic algorithms, hill climbing, random search and systematic search to a set of six subject programs. As a benchmark, the results are compared to those from an existing analytical algorithm for amorphous slicing, which was written specifically to perform well with the sorts of program under consideration. The results, while tentative at this stage, do give grounds for optimism. The search techniques proved able to reduce the size of the programs under consideration in all cases, sometimes equaling the performance of the specifically-tailored analytic algorithm. In one case, the search techniques performed better, highlighting a fault in the existing algorith

The Evaluation of Enhanced Academic Instruction in After-School Programs: Findings After the First Year of Implementation

This report presents one-year implementation and impact findings on two supplemental academic instruction approaches developed for after-school settings -- one for math and one for reading. Compared with regular after-school programming, the supplemental math program had impacts on student SAT 10 test scores and the supplemental reading program did not --although the reading program had some effect on reading fluency