Automatic Test Generation for Space

The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST needs

GammaPolarSlicer

In software development, it is often desirable to reuse existing software components. This has been recognized since 1968, when Douglas Mcllroy of Bell Laboratories proposed basing the software industry on reuse. Despite the failures in practice, many efforts have been made to make this idea successful. In this context, we address the problem of reusing annotated components as a rigorous way of assuring the quality of the application under construction. We in- troduce the concept of caller-based slicing as a way to certify that the integration of an annotated component with a contract into a legacy system will preserve the behavior of the former. To complement the efforts done and the benefits of the slicing techniques, there is also a need to find an efficient way to visualize the annotated components and their slices. To take full profit of visualization, it is crucial to combine the visualization of the control/data flow with the textual representation of source code. To attain this objective, we extend the notion of System Dependence Graph and slicing criterion.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

Plagiarism detection: A tool survey and comparison

We illustrate the state of the art in software plagiarism detection tools by comparing their features and testing them against a wide range of source codes. The source codes were edited according to several types of plagiarism to show the tools accuracy at detecting each type. The decision to focus our research on plagiarism of programming languages is two fold: on one hand, it is a challenging case-study since programming languages impose a structured writing style; on the other hand, we are looking for the integration of such a tool in an Automatic-Grading System (AGS) developed to support teachers in the context of Programming courses. Besides the systematic characterisation of the underlying problem domain, the tools were surveyed with the objective of identifying the most successful approach in order to design the aimed plugin for our AGS.(undefined

Exploring and visualizing the ”Alma” of XML documents

In this paper we introduce eXVisXML, a visual tool to explore documents annotated with the mark-up language XML, in order to easily perform over them tasks as knowledge extraction or document engineering. eXVisXML was designed mainly for two kind of users. Those who want to analyze an annotated document to explore the information contained, for them a visual inspection tool can be of great help, and a slicing functionality can be an efective complement. The other target group is composed by document engineers who might be interested in assessing the quality of the annotation created. This can be achieved through the measurements of some parameters that will allow to compare the elements and attributes of the DTD/Schema against those efectively used in the document instances. Both functionalities and the way they were delineated and implemented will be discussed along the paper.FC

Constructing program animations using a pattern-based approach

The aim of this paper is to discuss how our pattern-based strategy for the visualization of data and control flow can effectively be used to animate the program and exhibit its behavior. That result allows us to propose its use for Program Comprehension. The animator uses well known compiler techniques to inspect the source code in order to extract the necessary information to visualize it and understand program execution. We convert the source program into an internal decorated (or attributed) abstract syntax tree and then we visualize the structure by traversing it, and applying visualization rules at each node according to a pre-defined rule-base. In order to calculate the next step in the program execution, a set of rewriting rules are applied to the tree. The visualization of this new tree is shown and the program animation is constructed using an iterative process. No changes are made in the source code, and the execution is simulated step by step. Several examples of visualization are shown to illustrate the approach and support our idea of applying it in the context of a Program Comprehension environment.FC

ALMA versus DDD

To be a debugger is a good thing! Since the very beginning of the programming activity, debuggers are the most important and widely used tools after editors and compilers; we completely recognize their importance for software development and testing. Debuggers work at machine level, after the compilation of the source program; they deal with assembly, or binary-code, and are mainly data structure inspectors. Alma is a program animator based on its abstract representation. The main idea is to show the algorithm being implemented by the program, independently from the language used to implement it. To say that ALMA is a debugger, with no value added, is not true! ALMA is a source code inspector but it deals with programming concepts instead of machine code. This makes possible to understand the source program at a conceptual level, and not only to fix run time errors. In this paper we compare our visualizer/animator system, ALMA, with one of the most well-known and used debuggers, the graphical version of GDB, the DDD program. The aim of the paper is twofold: the immediate objective is to prove that ALMA provides new features that are not usually offered by debuggers; the main contribution is to recall the concepts of debugger and animator, and clarify the role of both tools in the field of program understanding, or program comprehension.FC

Pattern-based program visualization

The aim of this paper is to discuss how our pattern-based strategy for the visualization of data and control flow can effectively be used to animate the program and exhibit its behavior. That result allows us to propose its use for Program Comprehension. The animator uses well known compiler techniques to inspect the source code in order to extract the necessary information to visualize it and understand program execution. We convert the source program into an internal decorated (or attributed) abstract syntax tree and then we visualize the structure by traversing it, and applying visualization rules at each node according to a pre-defined rule-base. No changes are made in the source code, and the execution is simulated. Several examples of visualization are shown to illustrate the approach and support our idea of applying it in the context of a Program Comprehension environment.FC

Amido-Black en el Revelado de Huellas Dactilares Ensangrentadas

La dactiloscopia es una rama de la Criminalística que por medio de las impresiones dactilares se puede identificar a la persona. El poder identificar a una persona por medio de las huellas que dejo impresas en cualquier superficie es vital para el esclarecimiento del hecho delictivo. Algo que se pudiera pensar que podría limitar u obstaculizar la fijación de las huellas dactilares es la sangre, pero no es así, hay reactivos especiales que se adhieren a las proteínas de la sangre y resaltan la huella, uno de ellos es el amido black.El objetivo de este artículo es aplicar el reactivo en superficies diferentes para ver en qué tipo de superficie funciona mejor y cuáles son las diferencias.Los resultados del experimento mostraron en la superficie lisa fragmentos parciales de las huellas impresas con sangre, mientras que en la superficie rugosa marco la huella completa pero fue imposible obtener aunque sea un fragmento de la huella.Se llegó a la conclusión de que el amido black puede llegar a funcionar tanto en superficies lisas como rugosas, sin embargo será de mayor dificultad lograr resultados positivos en la superficie rugosa, mientras que en la superficie lisa, siguiendo el procedimiento adecuado, se pueden obtener muy buenos resultados y lograr una visibilidad de la huella completa

Procrastinación, autoconocimiento y búsqueda de la congruencia en mujeres líderes. Una intervención desde el Desarrollo Humano

Este trabajo de intervención, se enfoca en la procrastinación en mujeres consideradas como líderes, por influir de manera directa en la formación de sus hijos y/o en las personas a su cargo en el contexto laboral o familiar. El objetivo es que, por medio del Desarrollo Humano, retomen sus propósitos de vida, para favorecer su crecimiento integral a partir de hacer consciente la procrastinación en la vida cotidiana como forma de autosabotaje. Al mismo tiempo, generar consciencia en las mujeres líderes, acerca de la forma en que su ejemplo repercute sobre las personas en las que generan algún tipo de influencia. El proceso de intervención se conforma de un taller intensivo, un acompañamiento por medio de una aplicación virtual y finalmente una sesión de grupo de encuentro. Con base en la evidencia se construyeron cuatro categorías: implicación personal consciente, procrastinación como forma de autosabotaje emocional, liderazgo de la mujer en la familia y búsqueda de congruencia. Entre los hallazgos destaca el reconocer que traer a la consciencia las experiencias pasadas, así como reflexionar acerca de la implicación personal, ayudan a generar un mayor autoconocimiento, y éste a su vez, contribuye a la validación del propio ser, en consecuencia, a sanar emocionalmente y a retomar los propósitos de vida y metas, que en ocasiones la persona ha truncado a causa de la procrastinación.ITESO, A. C