10,098 research outputs found
Towards Test Coverage Criteria for Visual Contracts
When testing component-based or service-oriented applications we cannot always rely on coverage criteria based on source code. Instead, we have to express our requirements for testing at the interface level. Specifying interfaces by graph transformation rules, so-called visual contracts, we define model-based coverage criteria exploiting the well-known relations of causal dependency and conflict on transformation rules.To this end we establish an observational semantics for graph transformation systems with rule signatures formalising a notion of test execution, and define dependency graphs to provide a structure on which coverage can be analysed
Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography
This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic
software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs
without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First,
it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and
crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also
known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint
and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this
article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body
of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems,
programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured
overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the
literature
Servitization strategies & firm boundary decisions
This PhD thesis focuses on a particular manifestation of the servitization of manufacturing
phenomenon, namely the offering of advanced asset management services for mature capital
equipment in a business to business context. In contrast to past research in the field, the study
approaches the issue from the often neglected point of view of the offeringsâ intended customers
and assumes a strategic perspective to shed light on the considerations that affect the customersâ
propensity to accept or reject them.
Upon conceptually analysing what the acceptance of such offerings actually requires of customers
at an operational level, the study reveals that the latter are in most cases required to outsource a
number of activities that have traditionally been handled inâhouse. Thus, the issue of accepting
servitized offerings of this nature is treated as a makeâorâbuy, or otherwise a firm boundary
decision dilemma on behalf of customers.
In adopting this treatment, the study then engages with the firm boundary/outsourcing literature
and considers the stateâofâtheâart in four contemporary theoretical frameworks of makeâorâbuy
decisions that reflect a customer firmâs efficiency, dependence, competence and identity related
strategic considerations. In particular, insights are drawn respectively from Transaction Cost
Economics, Resource Dependency Theory, a strand of the ResourceâBased View of the firm as
well as the tenet of Identity Coherence.
Augmented with a number of novel propositions, the collective body of considerations is then
empirically explored through a quasiâexperimental crossâsectional survey of deepâsea dry and wet
cargo shipping firms (considered as customers of servitization) that focuses on six key
maintenance activities related to a shipâs main propulsion engine (considered as the object of
servitization).
In performing a two tier statistical analysis of the empirical data through logistic and multiple
regression techniques, the study finds that alternative considerations affect a customer firmâs
decision of whether to outsource an activity or not and the decision of how much of an activity to
outsource once the firstâtier dilemma is answered positively. Furthermore, the study finds that
combined theoretical perspective approaches offer better explanations of the phenomenon in
question.
With its conclusion, the thesis offers a number of implications directed at the literature streams
involved as well as the practice of outsourcing and pursuing a servitization strategy
Automated Semantic Analysis, Legal Assessment, and Summarization of Standard Form Contracts
Consumers are confronted with standard form contracts on a daily basis, for example, when shopping online, registering for online platforms, or opening bank accounts. With expected revenue of more than 343 billion Euro in 2020, e-commerce is an ever more important branch of the European economy. Accepting standard form contracts often is a prerequisite to access products or services, and consumers frequently do so without reading, let alone understanding, them. Consumer protection organizations can advise and represent consumers in such situations of power imbalance. However, with increasing demand, limited budgets, and ever more complex regulations, they struggle to provide the necessary support. This thesis investigates techniques for the automated semantic analysis, legal assessment, and summarization of standard form contracts in German and English, which can be used to support consumers and those who protect them. We focus on Terms and Conditions from the fast growing market of European e-commerce, but also show that the developed techniques can in parts be applied to other types of standard form contracts. We elicited requirements from consumers and consumer advocates to understand their needs, identified the most relevant clause topics, and analyzed the processes in consumer protection organizations concerning the handling of standard form contracts. Based on these insights, a pipeline for the automated semantic analysis, legal assessment, and summarization of standard form contracts was developed. The components of this pipeline can automatically identify and extract standard form contracts from the internet and hierarchically structure them into their individual clauses. Clause topics can be automatically identified, and relevant information can be extracted. Clauses can then be legally assessed, either using a knowledge-base we constructed or through binary classification by a transformer model. This information is then used to create summaries that are tailored to the needs of the different user groups. For each step of the pipeline, different approaches were developed and compared, from classical rule-based systems to deep learning techniques. Each approach was evaluated on German and English corpora containing more than 10,000 clauses, which were annotated as part of this thesis. The developed pipeline was prototypically implemented as part of a web-based tool to support consumer advocates in analyzing and assessing standard form contracts. The implementation was evaluated with experts from two German consumer protection organizations with questionnaires and task-based evaluations. The results of the evaluation show that our system can identify over 50 different types of clauses, which cover more than 90% of the clauses typically occurring in Terms and Conditions from online shops, with an accuracy of 0.80 to 0.84. The system can also automatically extract 21 relevant data points from these clauses with a precision of 0.91 and a recall of 0.86. On a corpus of more than 200 German clauses, the system was also able to assess the legality of clauses with an accuracy of 0.90. The expert evaluation has shown that the system is indeed able to support consumer advocates in their daily work by reducing the time they need to analyze and assess clauses in standard form contracts
Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking
Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized
Automating Regression Test Selection for Web Services
As Web services grow in maturity and use, so do the methods which are being used to test and maintain them. Regression Testing is a major component of most major testing systems but has only begun to be applied to Web services. The majority of the tools and techniques applying regression test to Web services are focused on test-case generation, thus ignoring the potential savings of regression test selection. Regression test selection optimizes the regression testing process by selecting a subset of all tests, while still maintaining some level of confidence about the system performing no worse than the unmodified system. A safe regression test selection technique implies that after selection, the level of confidence is as high as it would be if no tests were removed. Since safe regression test selection techniques generally involve code-based (white-box) testing, they cannot be directly applied to Web services due to their loosely-coupled, standards-based, and distributed nature. A framework which automates both the regression test selection and regression testing processes for Web services in a decentralized, end-to-end manner is proposed. As part of this approach, special consideration is given to the concurrency issues which may occur in an autonomous and decentralized system. The resulting synchronization method will be presented along with a set of algorithms which manage the regression testing and regression test selection processes throughout the system. A set of empirical results demonstrate the feasibility and benefit of the approach
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
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