8,509 research outputs found
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
MORPH: A Reference Architecture for Configuration and Behaviour Self-Adaptation
An architectural approach to self-adaptive systems involves runtime change of
system configuration (i.e., the system's components, their bindings and
operational parameters) and behaviour update (i.e., component orchestration).
Thus, dynamic reconfiguration and discrete event control theory are at the
heart of architectural adaptation. Although controlling configuration and
behaviour at runtime has been discussed and applied to architectural
adaptation, architectures for self-adaptive systems often compound these two
aspects reducing the potential for adaptability. In this paper we propose a
reference architecture that allows for coordinated yet transparent and
independent adaptation of system configuration and behaviour
Tortoise: Interactive System Configuration Repair
System configuration languages provide powerful abstractions that simplify
managing large-scale, networked systems. Thousands of organizations now use
configuration languages, such as Puppet. However, specifications written in
configuration languages can have bugs and the shell remains the simplest way to
debug a misconfigured system. Unfortunately, it is unsafe to use the shell to
fix problems when a system configuration language is in use: a fix applied from
the shell may cause the system to drift from the state specified by the
configuration language. Thus, despite their advantages, configuration languages
force system administrators to give up the simplicity and familiarity of the
shell.
This paper presents a synthesis-based technique that allows administrators to
use configuration languages and the shell in harmony. Administrators can fix
errors using the shell and the technique automatically repairs the higher-level
specification written in the configuration language. The approach (1) produces
repairs that are consistent with the fix made using the shell; (2) produces
repairs that are maintainable by minimizing edits made to the original
specification; (3) ranks and presents multiple repairs when relevant; and (4)
supports all shells the administrator may wish to use. We implement our
technique for Puppet, a widely used system configuration language, and evaluate
it on a suite of benchmarks under 42 repair scenarios. The top-ranked repair is
selected by humans 76% of the time and the human-equivalent repair is ranked
1.31 on average.Comment: Published version in proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 201
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
- …