Teaching Concurrent Software Design: A Case Study Using Android

In this article, we explore various parallel and distributed computing topics from a user-centric software engineering perspective. Specifically, in the context of mobile application development, we study the basic building blocks of interactive applications in the form of events, timers, and asynchronous activities, along with related software modeling, architecture, and design topics.Comment: Submitted to CDER NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing - Core Topics for Undergraduate

International conference on software engineering and knowledge engineering: Session chair

The Thirtieth International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2018) will be held at the Hotel Pullman, San Francisco Bay, USA, from July 1 to July 3, 2018. SEKE2018 will also be dedicated in memory of Professor Lofti Zadeh, a great scholar, pioneer and leader in fuzzy sets theory and soft computing. The conference aims at bringing together experts in software engineering and knowledge engineering to discuss on relevant results in either software engineering or knowledge engineering or both. Special emphasis will be put on the transference of methods between both domains. The theme this year is soft computing in software engineering & knowledge engineering. Submission of papers and demos are both welcome

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

SmartFuzz: An automated smart fuzzing approach for testing SmartThings apps

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Black-box Testing Mobile Applications Using Sequence Covering Arrays

Covering arrays have proven to be highly effective in detecting software bugs in what is known as combinatorial testing. A t-way covering array includes all t-way combinations of variable values, up to a specified level of t (usually 2-6 for software testing). In software systems that operate via a series of interactive inputs e.g. button clicks, a sequence covering array composed of sequences of events can be used. A t-way sequence covering array includes all t-way permutations of events (events are not required to be adjacent). This research examines the effectiveness of using sequence covering arrays to discover software bugs in mobile phone applications. Analysis of the distribution of t-way interactions between events in event sequence bugs provides insight into the practicality and usefulness of this combinatorial testing method. From a developer’s perspective, these methods can contribute to finding this particular class of bugs early in the software development process, saving the developers time and money without sacrificing effectiveness. However, an attacker may also leverage these techniques to discover previously undetected bugs as a means to exploit the system. This method can be particularly useful for attackers in that it is often simple to determine events in interactive software, even in black-box environments where internal knowledge about the source code is absent. Mobile applications running on popular operating systems such as Android and iOS are generally very interactive and therefore susceptible to these types of bugs. This project involved analyzing hundreds of software vulnerabilities in Android software, developing a new research tool for measuring sequence coverage in existing test suites, and using these combinatorial methods on various Android mobile applications