An empirical investigation into the impact of refactoring on regression testing

It is widely believed that refactoring improves software quality and developer’s productivity by making it easier to maintain and understand software systems. On the other hand, some believe that refactoring has the risk of functionality regression and increased testing cost. This paper investigates the impact of refactoring edits on regression tests using the version history of Java open source projects: (1) Are there adequate regression tests for refactoring in practice? (2) How many of existing regression tests are relevant to refactoring edits and thus need to be re-run for the new version? (3) What proportion of failure-inducing changes are relevant to refactorings? By using a refactoring reconstruction analysis and a change impact analysis in tandem, we investigate the relationship between the types and locations of refactoring edits identified by RefFinder and the affecting changes and affected tests identified by the FaultTracer change impact analysis. The results on three open source projects, JMeter, XMLSecurity, and ANT, show that only 22% of refactored methods and fields are tested by existing regression tests. While refactorings only constitutes 8% of atomic changes, 38% of affected tests are relevant to refactorings. Furthermore, refactorings are involved in almost a half of failed test cases. These results call for new automated regression test augmentation and selection techniques for validating refactoring edits.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Should the IRS Never Target Taxpayers? An Examination of the IRS Tea Party Affair

This article is part of a symposium held at Valparaiso University Law School entitled Money in Politics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In 2013, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration faulted the Internal Revenue Service for the appearance of impartiality because it used names and policy positions such as “Tea Party” and conservative ideology to pick applications for tax-exempt status for greater scrutiny. The Inspector General\u27s review came after members of Congress accused the Service of targeting conservative organizations. This Article finds the Inspector General\u27s claim lacks a firm foundation. The use of names to select organizations for closer review fits well within the discretionary space that both Congress and courts provide to the Service to collect revenue. However, a narrower legal and ethical claim is supportable: where an enforcement choice impinges on a fundamental constitutional right the Service should exercise a higher degree of care to ensure that its screening choices do not appear biased in an unconstitutional manner. Thus, this review finds the Inspector General\u27s primary claim regarding it being inappropriate to use names to screen applications to be incorrect. However, it finds that the Service violated an ethical norm because it failed to bring a high level of care to a matter that at least impinged on a fundamental Constitutional right. The Article recommends that the Service continue using names to screen applications for tax-exempt status. However, the Article suggests the Service implement procedures to document an unbiased process when evaluating applications that raise questions of a fundamental Constitutional nature

International Human Rights: Islam\u27s Friend or Foe? Algeria as an Example of the Compatibility of International Human Rights Regarding Women\u27s Equality and Islamic Law

Part I of this Note briefly discusses the development of International Human Rights Law as embodied in international covenants today. Part I also discusses Islamic law, the traditional role of women under Islamic law and culture, Algeria\u27s Constitution and Family Code, and other dynamics specific to Algeria that have hindered women\u27s obtainment of equal rights in the modern era. Part II presents the debate between conservative Islamists who argue that international principles of human rights law are incompatible with Islamic law and the scholars who assert that the two are compatible. Part III, by focusing on fundamental principles underlying the provisions in both the international human rights doctrine and Islamic law, argues that international human rights provisions granting women equal status with men comport with Islamic law principles as much as do legal documents that the Algerian Government has drafted. This Note concludes that the deprivation of women\u27s equal rights based on the claim of conflict with Islamic law is unjustified and that the example of Algeria proves that Islamic countries can and should protect human rights without regard to gender

Above the Law: The Prosecutor\u27s Duty to Seek Justice and the Performance of Substantial Assistance Agreements

We study the gravitational-wave (GW) signatures of clouds of ultralight bosons around black holes (BHs) in binary inspirals. These clouds, which are formed via superradiance instabilities for rapidly rotating BHs, produce distinct effects in the population of BH masses and spins, and, for real fields, a continuous monochromatic GW signal. We show that the presence of a binary companion greatly enriches the dynamical evolution of the system, most remarkably through the existence of resonant transitions between the growing and decaying modes of the cloud (analogous to Rabi oscillations in atomic physics). These resonances have rich phenomenological implications for current and future GW detectors. Notably, the amplitude of the GW signal from the clouds may be reduced, and in many cases terminated, much before the binary merger. The presence of a boson cloud can also be revealed in the GW signal from the binary through the imprint of finite-size effects, such as spin-induced multipole moments and tidal Love numbers. The time dependence of the cloud's energy density during the resonance leads to a sharp feature, or at least attenuation, in the contribution from the finite-size terms to the waveforms. The observation of these effects would constrain the properties of putative ultralight bosons through precision GW data, offering new probes of physics beyond the Standard Model

Propagators and Solvers for the Algebra of Modular Systems

To appear in the proceedings of LPAR 21. Solving complex problems can involve non-trivial combinations of distinct knowledge bases and problem solvers. The Algebra of Modular Systems is a knowledge representation framework that provides a method for formally specifying such systems in purely semantic terms. Formally, an expression of the algebra defines a class of structures. Many expressive formalism used in practice solve the model expansion task, where a structure is given on the input and an expansion of this structure in the defined class of structures is searched (this practice overcomes the common undecidability problem for expressive logics). In this paper, we construct a solver for the model expansion task for a complex modular systems from an expression in the algebra and black-box propagators or solvers for the primitive modules. To this end, we define a general notion of propagators equipped with an explanation mechanism, an extension of the alge- bra to propagators, and a lazy conflict-driven learning algorithm. The result is a framework for seamlessly combining solving technology from different domains to produce a solver for a combined system.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of LPAR 2