255,082 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
FORTEST: Formal methods and testing
Formal methods have traditionally been used for specification and development of software. However there are potential benefits for the testing stage as well. The panel session associated with this paper explores the usefulness
or otherwise of formal methods in various contexts for improving software testing. A number of different possibilities for the use of formal methods are explored and questions raised. The contributors are all members of the UK FORTEST Network on formal methods and testing. Although
the authors generally believe that formal methods
are useful in aiding the testing process, this paper is intended to provoke discussion. Dissenters are encouraged to put their views to the panel or individually to the authors
KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development
Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system
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
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