Translating Video Recordings of Mobile App Usages into Replayable Scenarios

Screen recordings of mobile applications are easy to obtain and capture a wealth of information pertinent to software developers (e.g., bugs or feature requests), making them a popular mechanism for crowdsourced app feedback. Thus, these videos are becoming a common artifact that developers must manage. In light of unique mobile development constraints, including swift release cycles and rapidly evolving platforms, automated techniques for analyzing all types of rich software artifacts provide benefit to mobile developers. Unfortunately, automatically analyzing screen recordings presents serious challenges, due to their graphical nature, compared to other types of (textual) artifacts. To address these challenges, this paper introduces V2S, a lightweight, automated approach for translating video recordings of Android app usages into replayable scenarios. V2S is based primarily on computer vision techniques and adapts recent solutions for object detection and image classification to detect and classify user actions captured in a video, and convert these into a replayable test scenario. We performed an extensive evaluation of V2S involving 175 videos depicting 3,534 GUI-based actions collected from users exercising features and reproducing bugs from over 80 popular Android apps. Our results illustrate that V2S can accurately replay scenarios from screen recordings, and is capable of reproducing $\approx$ 89% of our collected videos with minimal overhead. A case study with three industrial partners illustrates the potential usefulness of V2S from the viewpoint of developers.Comment: In proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'20), 13 page

OpenJML: Software verification for Java 7 using JML, OpenJDK, and Eclipse

OpenJML is a tool for checking code and specifications of Java programs. We describe our experience building the tool on the foundation of JML, OpenJDK and Eclipse, as well as on many advances in specification-based software verification. The implementation demonstrates the value of integrating specification tools directly in the software development IDE and in automating as many tasks as possible. The tool, though still in progress, has now been used for several college-level courses on software specification and verification and for small-scale studies on existing Java programs.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2014, arXiv:1404.578

An Experience-Driven Pedagogy for the Instruction of Software Testing in Computer Science

In the realm of computer programming, the experience of writing a program is used to reinforce concepts and evaluate ability. This research uses three case studies to evaluate the introduction of testing through Kolb\u27s Experiential Learning Model (ELM). We then analyze the impact of those testing experiences to determine methods for improving future courses. The first testing experience that students encounter are unit test reports in their early courses. This course demonstrates that automating and improving feedback can provide more ELM iterations. The JUnit Generation (JUG) tool also provided a positive experience for the instructor by reducing the overall workload. Later, undergraduate and graduate students have the opportunity to work together in a multi-role Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) course. The interactions use usability analysis techniques with graduate students as usability experts and undergraduate students as design engineers. Students get experience testing the user experience of their product prototypes using methods varying from heuristic analysis to user testing. From this course, we learned the importance of the instructors role in the ELM. As more roles were added to the HCI course, a desire arose to provide more complete, quality assured software. This inspired the addition of unit testing experiences to the course. However, we learned that significant preparations must be made to apply the ELM when students are resistant. The research presented through these courses was driven by the recognition of a need for testing in a Computer Science curriculum. Our understanding of the ELM suggests the need for student experience when being introduced to testing concepts. We learned that experiential learning, when appropriately implemented, can provide benefits to the Computer Science classroom. When examined together, these course-based research projects provided insight into building strong testing practices into a curriculum

How to systematically classify computer security intrusions

This paper presents a classification of intrusions with respect to the technique as well the result. The taxonomy is intended to be a step on the road to an established taxonomy of intrusions for use in incident reporting, statistics, warning bulletins, intrusion detection systems etc. Unlike previous schemes, it takes the viewpoint of the system owner and should therefore be suitable to a wider community than that of system developers and vendors only. It is based on data from a realistic intrusion experiment, a fact that supports the practical applicability of the scheme. The paper also discusses general aspects of classification, and introduces a concept called dimension. After having made a broad survey of previous work in the field, we decided to base our classification of intrusion techniques on a scheme proposed by Neumann and Parker (1989) and to further refine relevant parts of their scheme. Our classification of intrusion results is derived from the traditional three aspects of computer security: confidentiality, availability and integrit

Leveraging Final Degree Projects for Open Source Software Contributions

(1) Background: final year students of computer science engineering degrees must carry out a final degree project (FDP) in order to graduate. Students’ contributions to improve open source software (OSS) through FDPs can offer multiple benefits and challenges, both for the students, the instructors and for the project itself. This work reports on a practical experience developed by four students contributing to mature OSS projects during their FDPs, detailing how they addressed the multiple challenges involved, both from the students and teachers perspective. (2) Methods: we followed the work of four students contributing to two established OSS projects for two academic years and analyzed their work on GitHub and their responses to a survey. (3) Results: we obtained a set of specific recommendations for future practitioners and detailed a list of benefits achieved by steering FDP towards OSS contributions, for students, teachers and the OSS projects. (4) Conclusions: we find out that FDPs oriented towards enhancing OSS projects can introduce students into real-world, practical examples of software engineering principles, give them a boost in their confidence about their technical and communication skills and help them build a portfolio of contributions to daily used worldwide open source applications