Examining User-Developer Feedback Loops in the iOS App Store

Application Stores, such as the iTunes App Store, give developers access to their users’ complaints and requests in the form of app reviews. However, little is known about how developers are responding to app reviews. Without such knowledge developers, users, App Stores, and researchers could build upon wrong foundations. To address this knowledge gap, in this study we focus on feedback loops, which occur when developers address a user concern. To conduct this study we use both supervised and unsupervised methods to automatically analyze a corpus of 1752 different apps from the iTunes App Store consisting of 30,875 release notes and 806,209 app reviews. We found that 18.7% of the apps in our corpus contain instances of feedback loops. In these feedback loops we observed interesting behaviors. For example, (i) feedback loops with feature requests and login issues were twice as likely as general bugs to be fixed by developers, (ii) users who reviewed with an even tone were most likely to have their concerns addressed, and (iii) the star rating of the app reviews did not influence the developers likelihood of completing a feedback loop

How do programs become more concurrent? A story of program transformations

For several decades, programmers have relied onMooreâ s Law to improve the performance of their softwareapplications. From now on, programmers need to programthe multi-cores if they want to deliver efficient code. Inthe multi-core era, a major maintenance task will be tomake sequential programs more concurrent. What are themost common transformations to retrofit concurrency intosequential programs?We studied the source code of 5 open-source Javaprojects. We analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively thechange patterns that developers have used in order toretrofit concurrency. We found that these transformationsbelong to four categories: transformations that improve thelatency, the throughput, the scalability, or correctness of theapplications. In addition, we report on our experience ofparallelizing one of our own programs. Our findings caneducate software developers on how to parallelize sequentialprograms, and can provide hints for tool vendors aboutwhat transformations are worth automating

Refactoring Sequential Java Code for Concurrency via Concurrent Libraries

Parallelizing existing sequential programs to run efficiently on multicores is hard. The Java 5 packagejava.util.concurrent (j.u.c.) supports writing concurrent programs: much of the complexity of writing threads-safe and scalable programs is hidden in the library. To use this package, programmers still need to reengineer existing code. This is tedious because it requires changing many lines of code, is error-prone because programmers can use the wrong APIs, and is omission-prone because programmers can miss opportunities to use the enhanced APIs. This paper presents our tool, CONCURRENCER, which enables programmers to refactor sequential code into parallel code that uses j.u.c. concurrent utilities. CONCURRENCER does not require any program annotations, although the transformations are very involved: they span multiple program statements and use custom program analysis. A find-and-replace tool can not perform such transformations. Empirical evaluation shows that CONCURRENCER refactors code effectively: CONCURRENCER correctly identifies and applies transformations that some open-source developers overlooked, and the converted code exhibits good speedup

Forced convective heat transfer through open cell foams

The purpose of this study is to investigate forced convection of air through open cell foams. It can be numerically investigated either by implementing the time efficient macroscopic models or computationally expensive microscopic models. However, during the course of this study, it was observed that the macroscopic models are not sufficient for determining the desired key parameters. Nevertheless, it is still possible that these macroscopic models can be used to design an application accurately with minimum time efforts if the concerned key parameters are already known through other means. Accordingly, in this work, a methodology is developed to determine the desired key parameters by implementing the microscopic models, which are further used into the macroscopic models for designing different applications. To validate the proposed methodology, a set of steady state and transient forced convection experiments were performed for a set of ceramic foams having different pore diameter (10−30 PPI) and porosity (0.79−0.87) for a superficial velocity in the range of 0.5−10 m/s

Are Web Applications Ready for Parallelism?

In recent years, web applications have become pervasive. Their backbone is JavaScript, the only programming language supported by all major web browsers. Most browsers run on desktop or mobile devices with parallel hardware. However, JavaScript is by design sequential, and current web applications make little use of hardware parallelism. Are web applications ready to exploit parallel hardware? \ \ To answer this question we take a two-step approach. First, we survey 174 web developers regarding the potential and challenges of using parallelism. Then, we study the performance and computation shape of a set of web applications that are representative for the emerging web. We identify performance bottlenecks and examine memory access patterns to determine possible data parallelism. \ \ Our findings indicate that emerging web applications do have latent data parallelism, and JavaScript developers\u27 programming style are not a significant impediment to exploiting this parallelism

From Commit Message Generation to History-Aware Commit Message Completion

Commit messages are crucial to software development, allowing developers to track changes and collaborate effectively. Despite their utility, most commit messages lack important information since writing high-quality commit messages is tedious and time-consuming. The active research on commit message generation (CMG) has not yet led to wide adoption in practice. We argue that if we could shift the focus from commit message generation to commit message completion and use previous commit history as additional context, we could significantly improve the quality and the personal nature of the resulting commit messages. In this paper, we propose and evaluate both of these novel ideas. Since the existing datasets lack historical data, we collect and share a novel dataset called CommitChronicle, containing 10.7M commits across 20 programming languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the completion setting and the usefulness of the historical context for state-of-the-art CMG models and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our results show that in some contexts, commit message completion shows better results than generation, and that while in general GPT-3.5-turbo performs worse, it shows potential for long and detailed messages. As for the history, the results show that historical information improves the performance of CMG models in the generation task, and the performance of GPT-3.5-turbo in both generation and completion.Comment: Accepted to ASE'23. 13 pages, 5 figure

Kinh tế Việt Nam vượt qua sóng gió thử thách năm 2023

Hôm nay, ngày cận kề cuối năm, Tổng cục Thống kê đã công bố số liệu kinh tế ước tính cả năm 2023. Đây là những con số rất nhiều người trông ngóng, bao gồm cả nhà đầu tư, giới kinh doanh, thị trường chứng khoán, và lẽ tự nhiên rất nhiều hộ gia đình ở Việt Nam

30 Years of Software Refactoring Research:A Systematic Literature Review

Due to the growing complexity of software systems, there has been a dramatic increase and industry demand for tools and techniques on software refactoring in the last ten years, defined traditionally as a set of program transformations intended to improve the system design while preserving the behavior. Refactoring studies are expanded beyond code-level restructuring to be applied at different levels (architecture, model, requirements, etc.), adopted in many domains beyond the object-oriented paradigm (cloud computing, mobile, web, etc.), used in industrial settings and considered objectives beyond improving the design to include other non-functional requirements (e.g., improve performance, security, etc.). Thus, challenges to be addressed by refactoring work are, nowadays, beyond code transformation to include, but not limited to, scheduling the opportune time to carry refactoring, recommendations of specific refactoring activities, detection of refactoring opportunities, and testing the correctness of applied refactorings. Therefore, the refactoring research efforts are fragmented over several research communities, various domains, and objectives. To structure the field and existing research results, this paper provides a systematic literature review and analyzes the results of 3183 research papers on refactoring covering the last three decades to offer the most scalable and comprehensive literature review of existing refactoring research studies. Based on this survey, we created a taxonomy to classify the existing research, identified research trends, and highlighted gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.Comment: 23 page

Finding Bugs in Web Applications Using Dynamic Test Generation and Explicit State Model Checking

Web script crashes and malformed dynamically-generated web pages are common errors, and they seriously impact the usability of web applications. Current tools for web-page validation cannot handle the dynamically generated pages that are ubiquitous on today's Internet. We present a dynamic test generation technique for the domain of dynamic web applications. The technique utilizes both combined concrete and symbolic execution and explicit-state model checking. The technique generates tests automatically, runs the tests capturing logical constraints on inputs, and minimizes the conditions on the inputs to failing tests, so that the resulting bug reports are small and useful in finding and fixing the underlying faults. Our tool Apollo implements the technique for the PHP programming language. Apollo generates test inputs for a web application, monitors the application for crashes, and validates that the output conforms to the HTML specification. This paper presents Apollo's algorithms and implementation, and an experimental evaluation that revealed 302 faults in 6 PHP web applications

Study and Refactoring of Android Asynchronous Programming

To avoid unresponsiveness, a core part of mobile development is asynchronous programming. Android provides several async constructs that developers can use. However, developers can still use the inappropriate async constructs, which result in memory leaks, lost results, and wasted energy. Fortunately, refactoring tools can eliminate these problems by transforming async code to use the appropriate constructs. In this paper we conducted a formative study on a corpus of 611 widely-used Android apps to map the asynchronous landscape of Android apps, understand how developers retrofit asynchrony, and learn about barriers encountered by developers. Based on this study, we designed, implemented, and evaluated ASYNCDROID, a refactoring tool which enables Android developers to transform existing improperly-used async constructs into correct constructs. Our empirical evaluation shows that ASYNCDROID is applicable, accurate, and saves developers effort. We submitted 30 refactoring patches, and developers consider that the refactorings are useful.Ope