Code examples are small source code fragments whose purpose is to illustrate how a programming language construct, an API, or a specific function/method works. Since code examples are not always available in the software documentation, researchers have ...

n-gram statistical language model has been successfully applied to capture programming patterns to support code completion and suggestion. However, the approaches using n-gram face challenges in capturing the patterns at higher levels of abstraction due ...

We propose a new method for dynamically generating likely invariants from multithreaded programs. While existing invariant generation tools work well on sequential programs, they are ineffective at reasoning about multithreaded programs both in terms of ...

The reliability of a prediction model depends on the quality of the data from which it was trained. Therefore, defect prediction models may be unreliable if they are trained using noisy data. Recent research suggests that randomly-injected noise that ...

Modern applications use back-end data stores for persistent data. Automated verification of the code that updates the data store would prevent bugs that can cause loss or corruption of data. In this paper, we focus on the most challenging part of this ...

Formal verification can provide the highest degree of software assurance. Demand for it is growing, but there are still few projects that have successfully applied it to sizeable, real-world systems. This lack of experience makes it hard to predict the ...

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) has been used in computer science for decades to formally specify programs, systems, desired properties, and relevant behaviors. This paper presents a novel, efficient technique for verifying LTL specifications in a fully ...

How can organizational factors such as structure and culture have an impact on the working conditions of developers? This study is based on ten months of observation of an in-house software development project within a large telecommunications company. ...

Background: Most of the experiments in software engineering (SE) employ students as subjects. This raises concerns about the realism of the results acquired through students and adaptability of the results to software industry. Aim: We compare students ...

The last decade has seen a dramatic growth in the use of constraint solvers as a computational mechanism, not only for analysis of software, but also at runtime. Solvers are available for a variety of logics but are generally restricted to first-order ...

Software is rapidly increasing in size and complexity. Static analyses must be designed to scale well if they are to be usable with realistic applications, but prior efforts have often been limited by available memory. We propose a database-backed ...

Researchers are currently drawn to study projects hosted on GitHub due to its popularity, ease of obtaining data, and its distinctive built-in social features. GitHub has been found to create a transparent development environment, which together with a ...

Effective software engineering demands a coordinated effort. Unfortunately, a comprehensive view on developer coordination is rarely available to support software-engineering decisions, despite the significant implications on software quality, software ...

One form of crowdsourcing is the competition, which poses an open call for competing solutions. Commercial systems such as TopCoder have begun to explore the application of competitions to software development, but have important limitations diminishing ...

Software analysis tools and techniques often leverage structural code coverage information to reason about the dynamic behavior of software. Existing techniques instrument the code with the required structural obligations and then monitor the execution ...

Automatic bug fixing has become a promising direction for reducing manual effort in debugging. However, general approaches to automatic bug fixing may face some fundamental difficulties. In this paper, we argue that automatic fixing of specific types of ...

Many interesting questions about the software quality of a code base can only be answered adequately if fine-grained information about the evolution of quality metrics over time and the contributions of individual developers is known. We present an ...

Logging is a common programming practice of practical importance to collect system runtime information for postmortem analysis. Strategic logging placement is desired to cover necessary runtime information without incurring unintended consequences (e.g.,...

Developers sometimes take the initiative to build tools to solve problems they face. What motivates developers to build these tools? What is the value for a company? Are the tools built useful for anyone besides their creator? We conducted a qualitative ...

We propose a new automated debugging method for regression testing based on a synergistic application of both dynamic and semantic analysis. Our method takes a failure-inducing test input, a buggy program, and an earlier correct version of the same ...