On the Relationship between Code Verifiability and Understandability

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate this assumption by comparing the number of warnings produced by four state-of-the-art verification tools on 211 snippets of Java code with 20 metrics of code comprehensibility from human subjects in six prior studies. Our experiments, based on a statistical (meta-)analysis, show that, in aggregate, there is a small correlation (r = 0.23) between understandability and verifiability. The results support the claim that easy-to-verify code is often easier to understand than code that requires more effort to verify. Our work has implications for the users and designers of verification tools and for future attempts to automatically measure code comprehensibility: verification tools may have ancillary benefits to understandability, and measuring understandability may require reasoning about semantic, not just syntactic, code properties.Comment: to appear at Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'23

Toward Accountable and Explainable Artificial Intelligence Part Two: The Framework Implementation

This paper builds upon the theoretical foundations of the Accountable eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (AXAI) capability framework presented in part one of this paper.We demonstrate incorporation of the AXAI capability in the real time Affective State Assessment Module (ASAM) of a robotic system. We show that adhering to the eXtreme Programming (XP) practices would help in understanding user behavior and systematic incorporation of the AXAI capability in AI systems. We further show that a collaborative software design and development process (SDDP) would facilitate identification of ethical, technical, functional, and domain-specific system requirements. Meeting these requirements would increase user confidence in AI systems. Our results show that the ASAM can synthesize discrete and continuous models of affective state expressions for classifying them in real-time. The ASAM continuously shares important inputs, processed data and the output information with users via a graphical user interface (GUI). Thus, the GUI provides reasons behind system decisions and disseminates information about local reasoning, data handling and decision-making. Through this demonstrated work, we expect to move toward enhancing AI systems’ acceptability, utility and establishing a chain of responsibility if a system fails. We hope this work will initiate further investigations on developing the AXAI capability and use of a suitable SDDP for incorporating them in AI systems

Fully automated calculation in fermion scattering

The package aITALC has been developed for fully automated calculations of two fermion production at e+ e- collider and other similar reactions. We emphasize the connection and interoperability between the different modules required for the calculation and the external tools Diana, Form and LoopTools. Results for e+ e- -> f anti-f, e+ e- are presented.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables, 2 figures. Contribution to the X International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, ACAT 2005, May 22-27, 2005, Zeuthen (Germany

Experiences in Using Practitioner’s Checklists to Evaluate the Relevance of Experiments Reported in Requirements Engineering

Background: Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers recognize that for RE methods to be adopted in industry, practitioners should be able to evaluate the relevance of a study to their practice. Kitchenham et al proposed a set of perspective-based checklists, which demonstrated to be a useful instrument for this purpose. Specifically, the checklist from the practitioner’s perspective seems to be a good candidate for evaluating the relevance of RE studies to RE practice. However, little is known about the applicability of the checklist to the area of RE. Moreover, this checklist also requires a greater analysis about its reliability. Aim: The aim of this report is to propose a perspective-based checklist to the RE community that allows evaluating the relevance of experimental studies in RE from the practitioner’s/consultant’s viewpoint. Method: Our research followed an iterative design-science based approach in which we first analyzed the problems with a previously published checklist and developed an operationalized proposal for a new checklist to counter these problems. We performed a reliability evaluation of this new checklist. The research was performed with two practitioners and 24 papers that report experimental results on comprehensibility of software requirements specifications. Results: This report gives first-hand experiences of practitioners in evaluating the relevance of primary studies in RE, by using a perspective-based checklist. With respect to the reliability of the adjusted checklist, 9 of out 19 questions show an acceptable proportion of agreement (between two practitioners). Conclusions: Based on our experience, the contextualization and operationalization of a perspective-based checklist helps to make it more useful for the practitioners. However, to increase the reliability of the checklist, more reviewers are required and more discussion cycles are necessary. Our plan is to involve at least two more practitioners in order to improve the reliability of the practitioner checklist proposed

Ada code reuse guidelines for design-for-reuse

The phenomenal growth in the costs of producing software over the last three decades has forced the computing industry to look for alternative strategies to that implied by the waterfall model of computer system development. One frequently observed solution is that of reusing the code from previously designed systems in the construction of new ones; this technique is known as software reuse. Ada language was developed as a tool to address the above problems and is believed to have many useful language features such as package and generics to produce reusable software. But programming in Ada does not guarantee the production of highly reusable software. Therefore guidelines for users are needed to maximise the benefits from using Ada. In this thesis, Ada code reuse guidelines are proposed, and as an attempt to prove the usefulness of them, reuse metrics are studied. The thesis concludes by stressing the novelty of the approach, the difficulties encountered, and enhancements to the proposed methods to overcome these shortcomings

Table-based formal specification approaches for control engineers—empirical studies of usability

The dependability characteristic of the control software of manufacturing systems is highlighted more than before, going through repeated changes to cope with various and varying requirements. Formal methods are researched to be applied to automation system engineering to obtain a more effective and efficient quality assurance. One of the approaches, a formal specification language named Generalised Test Tables has been developed with the aim of intuitiveness and accessibility for automation application developers. The result of the experiments conducted to assess the usability of this language is presented here. Focussing on evaluating effectiveness and user satisfaction, three paper-based experiments have been conducted with students at the bachelor and master level. The evaluation results point to positive usability in both comparative effectiveness to conventional language, that is, Petri Nets, and subjective perception of user satisfaction