A Machine With Class: A Framework for Object Generation, Integration and Language Authentication (FROGILA)

The object technology model is constantly evolving to address the software crisis problem. This novel idea which informed and currently guides the design style of most modern scalable software systems has caused a strong belief that the object-oriented technology is the ultimate answer to the software crisis, i.e. applying an object-oriented development method will eventually lead to quality code. It is important to emphasise that object-orientedness does not make testing obsolete. As a matter of fact, some aspects of its very nature introduce new problems into the production of correct programs and their testing due to paradigmatic features like encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism and dynamic binding as this research work shows. Most work in testing research has centred on procedure-oriented software with worthwhile methods of testing having been developed as a result. However, those cannot be applied directly to object-oriented software owing to the fact that the architectures of such systems differ on many key issues. In this thesis, we investigate and review the problems introduced by the features of the object technology model and then proceed to show why traditional structured software testing techniques are insufficient for testing object-oriented software by comparing the fundamental differences in their architecture. Also, by reviewing Weyuker’s test adequacy axioms we show that program-based testing and specification-based testing are orthogonal and complementary. Thus, a software testing methodology that is solely based on one of these approaches (i.e. program-based or specification-based testing) cannot adequately cover all the essential paths of the system under test or satisfactorily guarantee correctness in practice. We argue that a new method is required which integrates the benefits of the two approaches and further builds upon their individual strengths to create a more meaningful, practical and reliable solution. To this end, this thesis introduces and discusses a new automaton-based framework formalism for object-oriented classes called the Class-Machine and a test method that is based on this formalism. Here, the notion of a class or the idea behind classification in object-oriented languages is embodied within a machine framework. The Class-Machine model represents a polymorphic abstraction for heterogeneous families of Object-Machines that model a real life problem in a given domain; these Object-Machines are instances of different concrete machine types. The Class-Machine has an extensible machine implementation as well as an extensible machine interface. Thus, the Class-Machine is introduced as a formal framework for generating autonomous Object-Machines (i.e. Object-Machine Generator) that share common Generic Class-Machine States and Specific Object-Machine States. The states of these Object-Machines are manipulated by a set of processing functions (i.e. Class-Machine Methods and Object-Machine Methods) that must satisfy a set of preconditions before they are allowed to modify the state(s) of the Object-Machines. The Class-Machine model can also be viewed as a platform for integrating a society of communicating Object-Machines. To verify and completely test systems that adhere to the Class-Machine framework, a novel testing method is proposed i.e. the fault-finders (f²) - a distributed family of software checkers specifically designed to crawl through a Class-Machine implementation to look for a particular type of fault and tell us the location of the fault in the program (i.e. the class under test). Given this information, we can statistically show the distribution of faults in an object-oriented system and then provide a probabilistic assertion of the number and type of faults that remain undetected after testing is completed. To address the problems caused through the encapsulation mechanism, this thesis introduces and discusses another novel framework formalism that has complete visibility on all the encapsulated methods, memory states of the instance and class variables of a given Object-Machine or Class-Machine system under test. We call this the Class Machine Friend Function (CMƒƒ). In order to further illustrate all the fundamental theoretical ideas and paradigmatic features inherent within our proposed Class-Machine model, this thesis considers four different Class-Machine case studies. Finally, to further show that the Class-Machine theoretical purity does not mitigate against practical concerns, our novel object-oriented specification, verification, debugging and testing approaches proposed in this thesis are exemplified in an automated testing tool called: The Class-Machine Testing Tool (CMTT)

A Static Verification Framework for Secure Peer-to-Peer Applications

In this paper we present a static verification framework to support the design and verification of secure peer-to-peer applications. The framework supports the specification, modeling, and analysis of security aspects together with the general characteristics of the system, during early stages of the development life-cycle. The approach avoids security issues to be taken into consideration as a separate layer that is added to the system as an afterthought by the use of security protocols. The main functionality supported by the framework are concerned with the modeling of the system together with its security aspects by using an extension of UML, modeling of abuse cases to represent scenarios of attackers and assist with the identification of properties to be verified, specification of properties to be verified in a graphical template language, verification of the models against the properties, and visualization of the results of the verification process

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

Annotated bibliography of Software Engineering Laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory is given. More than 100 publications are summarized. These publications cover many areas of software engineering and range from research reports to software documentation. All materials have been grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: The Software Engineering Laboratory; The Software Engineering Laboratory: Software Development Documents; Software Tools; Software Models; Software Measurement; Technology Evaluations; Ada Technology; and Data Collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author

Annotated bibliography of software engineering laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography is presented of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory. The bibliography was updated and reorganized substantially since the original version (SEL-82-006, November 1982). All materials were grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: (1) The Software Engineering Laboratory; (2) The Software Engineering Laboratory: Software Development Documents; (3) Software Tools; (4) Software Models; (5) Software Measurement; (6) Technology Evaluations; (7) Ada Technology; and (8) Data Collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author

Annotated bibliography of software engineering laboratory literature

An annotated bibliography of technical papers, documents, and memorandums produced by or related to the Software Engineering Laboratory is given. More than 100 publications are summarized. These publications cover many areas of software engineering and range from research reports to software documentation. This document has been updated and reorganized substantially since the original version (SEL-82-006, November 1982). All materials have been grouped into eight general subject areas for easy reference: the Software Engineering Laboratory; the Software Engineering Laboratory-software development documents; software tools; software models; software measurement; technology evaluations; Ada technology; and data collection. Subject and author indexes further classify these documents by specific topic and individual author

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

Metamodel Instance Generation: A systematic literature review

Modelling and thus metamodelling have become increasingly important in Software Engineering through the use of Model Driven Engineering. In this paper we present a systematic literature review of instance generation techniques for metamodels, i.e. the process of automatically generating models from a given metamodel. We start by presenting a set of research questions that our review is intended to answer. We then identify the main topics that are related to metamodel instance generation techniques, and use these to initiate our literature search. This search resulted in the identification of 34 key papers in the area, and each of these is reviewed here and discussed in detail. The outcome is that we are able to identify a knowledge gap in this field, and we offer suggestions as to some potential directions for future research.Comment: 25 page

Behavioral types in programming languages

A recent trend in programming language research is to use behav- ioral type theory to ensure various correctness properties of large- scale, communication-intensive systems. Behavioral types encompass concepts such as interfaces, communication protocols, contracts, and choreography. The successful application of behavioral types requires a solid understanding of several practical aspects, from their represen- tation in a concrete programming language, to their integration with other programming constructs such as methods and functions, to de- sign and monitoring methodologies that take behaviors into account. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of these aspects, which we summarize as the pragmatics of behavioral types