259,131 research outputs found
Automated Fixing of Programs with Contracts
This paper describes AutoFix, an automatic debugging technique that can fix
faults in general-purpose software. To provide high-quality fix suggestions and
to enable automation of the whole debugging process, AutoFix relies on the
presence of simple specification elements in the form of contracts (such as
pre- and postconditions). Using contracts enhances the precision of dynamic
analysis techniques for fault detection and localization, and for validating
fixes. The only required user input to the AutoFix supporting tool is then a
faulty program annotated with contracts; the tool produces a collection of
validated fixes for the fault ranked according to an estimate of their
suitability.
In an extensive experimental evaluation, we applied AutoFix to over 200
faults in four code bases of different maturity and quality (of implementation
and of contracts). AutoFix successfully fixed 42% of the faults, producing, in
the majority of cases, corrections of quality comparable to those competent
programmers would write; the used computational resources were modest, with an
average time per fix below 20 minutes on commodity hardware. These figures
compare favorably to the state of the art in automated program fixing, and
demonstrate that the AutoFix approach is successfully applicable to reduce the
debugging burden in real-world scenarios.Comment: Minor changes after proofreadin
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
An Empirical Study of Cohesion and Coupling: Balancing Optimisation and Disruption
Search based software engineering has been extensively applied to the problem of finding improved modular structures that maximise cohesion and minimise coupling. However, there has, hitherto, been no longitudinal study of developers’ implementations, over a series of sequential releases. Moreover, results validating whether developers respect the fitness functions are scarce, and the potentially disruptive effect of search-based remodularisation is usually overlooked. We present an empirical study of 233 sequential releases of 10 different systems; the largest empirical study reported in the literature so far, and the first longitudinal study. Our results provide evidence that developers do, indeed, respect the fitness functions used to optimise cohesion/coupling (they are statistically significantly better than arbitrary choices with p << 0.01), yet they also leave considerable room for further improvement (cohesion/coupling can be improved by 25% on average). However, we also report that optimising the structure is highly disruptive (on average more than 57% of the structure must change), while our results reveal that developers tend to avoid such disruption. Therefore, we introduce and evaluate a multi-objective evolutionary approach that minimises disruption while maximising cohesion/coupling improvement. This allows developers to balance reticence to disrupt existing modular structure, against their competing need to improve cohesion and coupling. The multi-objective approach is able to find modular structures that improve the cohesion of developers’ implementations by 22.52%, while causing an acceptably low level of disruption (within that already tolerated by developers)
Rationale in Development Chat Messages: An Exploratory Study
Chat messages of development teams play an increasingly significant role in
software development, having replaced emails in some cases. Chat messages
contain information about discussed issues, considered alternatives and
argumentation leading to the decisions made during software development. These
elements, defined as rationale, are invaluable during software evolution for
documenting and reusing development knowledge. Rationale is also essential for
coping with changes and for effective maintenance of the software system.
However, exploiting the rationale hidden in the chat messages is challenging
due to the high volume of unstructured messages covering a wide range of
topics. This work presents the results of an exploratory study examining the
frequency of rationale in chat messages, the completeness of the available
rationale and the potential of automatic techniques for rationale extraction.
For this purpose, we apply content analysis and machine learning techniques on
more than 8,700 chat messages from three software development projects. Our
results show that chat messages are a rich source of rationale and that machine
learning is a promising technique for detecting rationale and identifying
different rationale elements.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures. The 14th International Conference on Mining
Software Repositories (MSR'17
Tracking of secondary and temporary objects in structural concrete work
Previous research has shown that “Scan-vs-BIM ” object recognition systems, that fuse 3D point clouds from Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) or digital photogrammetry with 4D project BIM, provide valuable information for tracking structural works. However, until now, the potential of these systems has been demonstrated for tracking progress of permanent structures only; no work has been reported yet on tracking secondary or temporary structures. For structural concrete work, temporary structures include formwork, scaffolding and shoring, while secondary components include rebar. Together, they constitute most of the earned value in concrete work. The impact of tracking such elements would thus be added veracity and detail to earned value calculations, and subsequently better project control and performance. This paper presents three different techniques for recognizing concrete construction secondary and temporary objects in TLS point clouds. Two of the techniques are tested using real-life data collected from a reinforced concrete building construction site. The preliminary experimental results show that it is feasible to recognize secondary and temporary objects in TLS point clouds with good accuracy; but it is envisaged that superior results could be achieved by using additional cues such colour and 3D edge information
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