Volume 31, Issue 2April 2022
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research-article
Model Transformation Development Using Automated Requirements Analysis, Metamodel Matching, and Transformation by Example
In this article, we address how the production of model transformations (MT) can be accelerated by automation of transformation synthesis from requirements, examples, and metamodels. We introduce a synthesis process based on metamodel matching, ...
research-article
Measuring and Modeling Group Dynamics in Open-Source Software Development: A Tensor Decomposition Approach
Many open-source software projects depend on a few core developers, who take over both the bulk of coordination and programming tasks. They are supported by peripheral developers, who contribute either via discussions or programming tasks, often for a ...
research-article
Classifying Mobile Applications Using Word Embeddings
Modern application stores enable developers to classify their apps by choosing from a set of generic categories, or genres, such as health, games, and music. These categories are typically static—new categories do not necessarily emerge over time to ...
research-article
Feature Matching-based Approaches to Improve the Robustness of Android Visual GUI Testing
- Luca Ardito,
- Andrea Bottino,
- Riccardo Coppola,
- Fabrizio Lamberti,
- Francesco Manigrasso,
- Lia Morra,
- Marco Torchiano
In automated Visual GUI Testing (VGT) for Android devices, the available tools often suffer from low robustness to mobile fragmentation, leading to incorrect results when running the same tests on different devices.
To soften these issues, we evaluate two ...
research-article
ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large-scale Software Development
Modern, complex software systems are being continuously extended and adjusted. The developers responsible for this may come from different teams or organizations, and may be distributed over the world. This may make it difficult to keep track of what ...
research-article
Why Do Developers Reject Refactorings in Open-Source Projects?
Refactoring operations are behavior-preserving changes aimed at improving source code quality. While refactoring is largely considered a good practice, refactoring proposals in pull requests are often rejected after the code review. Understanding the ...
research-article
Analyzing Uncertainty in Release Planning: A Method and Experiment for Fixed-Date Release Cycles
Release planning—deciding what features to implement in upcoming releases of a software system—is a critical activity in iterative software development. Many release planning methods exist, but most ignore the inevitable uncertainty in estimating software ...
research-article
How Software Refactoring Impacts Execution Time
- Luca Traini,
- Daniele Di Pompeo,
- Michele Tucci,
- Bin Lin,
- Simone Scalabrino,
- Gabriele Bavota,
- Michele Lanza,
- Rocco Oliveto,
- Vittorio Cortellessa
Refactoring aims at improving the maintainability of source code without modifying its external behavior. Previous works proposed approaches to recommend refactoring solutions to software developers. The generation of the recommended solutions is guided ...
research-article
A Practical Approach for Dynamic Taint Tracking with Control-flow Relationships
Dynamic taint tracking, a technique that traces relationships between values as a program executes, has been used to support a variety of software engineering tasks. Some taint tracking systems only consider data flows and ignore control flows. As a ...
research-article
A Tale of Two Cities: Software Developers Working from Home during the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Denae Ford,
- Margaret-Anne Storey,
- Thomas Zimmermann,
- Christian Bird,
- Sonia Jaffe,
- Chandra Maddila,
- Jenna L. Butler,
- Brian Houck,
- Nachiappan Nagappan
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the world to its core and has provoked an overnight exodus of developers who normally worked in an office setting to working from home. The magnitude of this shift and the factors that have accompanied this new unplanned ...
research-article
Guided Feature Identification and Removal for Resource-constrained Firmware
IoT firmware oftentimes incorporates third-party components, such as network-oriented middleware and media encoders/decoders. These components consist of large and mature codebases, shipping with a variety of non-critical features. Feature bloat increases ...
research-article
In-IDE Code Generation from Natural Language: Promise and Challenges
A great part of software development involves conceptualizing or communicating the underlying procedures and logic that needs to be expressed in programs. One major difficulty of programming is turning concept into code, especially when dealing with the ...
research-article
Why Do Smart Contracts Self-Destruct? Investigating the Selfdestruct Function on Ethereum
The selfdestruct function is provided by Ethereum smart contracts to destroy a contract on the blockchain system. However, it is a double-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, using the selfdestruct function enables developers to remove smart ...
SECTION: Continuous Special Section: AI and SE
research-article
What You See is What it Means! Semantic Representation Learning of Code based on Visualization and Transfer Learning
Recent successes in training word embeddings for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks have encouraged a wave of research on representation learning for source code, which builds on similar NLP methods. The overall objective is then to produce code ...
research-article
A Systematic Literature Review on the Use of Deep Learning in Software Engineering Research
An increasingly popular set of techniques adopted by software engineering (SE) researchers to automate development tasks are those rooted in the concept of Deep Learning (DL). The popularity of such techniques largely stems from their automated feature ...
research-article
OSS Effort Estimation Using Software Features Similarity and Developer Activity-Based Metrics
Software development effort estimation (SDEE) generally involves leveraging the information about the effort spent in developing similar software in the past. Most organizations do not have access to sufficient and reliable forms of such data from past ...
research-article
SemMT: A Semantic-Based Testing Approach for Machine Translation Systems
Machine translation has wide applications in daily life. In mission-critical applications such as translating official documents, incorrect translation can have unpleasant or sometimes catastrophic consequences. This motivates recent research on the ...
SECTION: Continuous Special Section: Security and SE
research-article
Buddy Stacks: Protecting Return Addresses with Efficient Thread-Local Storage and Runtime Re-Randomization
Shadow stacks play an important role in protecting return addresses to mitigate ROP attacks. Parallel shadow stacks, which shadow the call stack of each thread at the same constant offset for all threads, are known not to support multi-threading well. On ...
research-article
A Study on Blockchain Architecture Design Decisions and Their Security Attacks and Threats
Blockchain is a disruptive technology intended to implement secure decentralised distributed systems, in which transactional data can be shared, stored, and verified by participants of the system without needing a central authentication/verification ...
survey
Software Engineering for AI-Based Systems: A Survey
- Silverio Martínez-Fernández,
- Justus Bogner,
- Xavier Franch,
- Marc Oriol,
- Julien Siebert,
- Adam Trendowicz,
- Anna Maria Vollmer,
- Stefan Wagner
AI-based systems are software systems with functionalities enabled by at least one AI component (e.g., for image-, speech-recognition, and autonomous driving). AI-based systems are becoming pervasive in society due to advances in AI. However, there is ...