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This document is a guest editorial for a special issue of the journal "Programming & Computer Software" titled "Recent Trends on Advanced Computing: The Converging Technologies." The issue features research and practical implementation results from researchers and industry experts in computer science, engineering, and technology. The papers cover a range of topics including microservices, software quality, user engagement on social media, non-functional requirements, medical software architecture, fallacies in political speeches, intelligent learning environments, and more. The guest editors for this special issue are Prof. Dr. Andrei Tchernykh, Prof. Reyes Juárez Ramírez, Dr. Esteban Mocskos, and Prof. Sergio Nesmachnow. [Extracted from the article]

Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There have been regular discussions in the SE community on this issue since the 1980's, led by pioneers such as Robert Glass. As we recently passed the milestone of "50 years of software engineering", some recent positive efforts have been made in this direction, e.g., establishing "industrial" tracks in several SE conferences. However, many researchers and practitioners believe that we, as a community, are still struggling with research relevance and utility. The goal of this paper is to synthesize the evidence and experience-based opinions shared on this topic so far in the SE community, and to encourage the community to further reflect and act on the research relevance. For this purpose, we have conducted a Multi-vocal Literature Review (MLR) of 54 systematically-selected sources (papers and non peer-reviewed articles). Instead of relying on and considering the individual opinions on research relevance, mentioned in each of the sources, the MLR aims to synthesize and provide the "holistic" view on the topic. The highlights of our MLR findings are as follows. The top three root causes of low relevance, discussed in the community, are: (1) Researchers having simplistic views (or wrong assumptions) about SE in practice; (2) Lack of connection with industry; and (3) Wrong identification of research problems. The top three suggestions for improving research relevance are: (1) Using appropriate research approaches such as action-research; (2) Choosing relevant (practical) research problems; and (3) Collaborating with industry. By synthesizing all the discussions on this important topic so far, this paper aims to encourage further discussions and actions in the community to increase our collective efforts to improve the research relevance. Furthermore, we raise the need for empirically-grounded and rigorous studies on the relevance problem in SE research, as carried out in other fields such as management science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research studies in software maintenance are notoriously hard to reproduce due to lack of datasets, tools, implementation details (e.g., parameter values, environmental settings) and other factors. The progress in the field is hindered by the challenge of comparing new techniques against existing ones, as researchers have to devote a large portion of their resources to the tedious and error-prone process of reproducing previously introduced approaches. In this paper, we address the problem of experiment reproducibility in software maintenance and provide a long-term solution towards ensuring that future experiments will be reproducible and extensible. We conducted a preliminary mapping study of a number of representative maintenance techniques and approaches and implemented them as a set of experiments and a library of components that we make publicly available with TraceLab, called the Component Library. The goal of these experiments and components is to create a body of actionable knowledge that would (i) facilitate future research and (ii) allow the research community to contribute to it as well. In addition, to illustrate the process of using and adapting these techniques, we present an example of creating new techniques based on existing ones, in order to produce improved results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a tool (iMPAcT) that automates testing of mobile applications based on the presence of recurring behaviour, UI Patterns. It combines reverse engineering, pattern matching and testing. The reverse engineering process is responsible for crawling the application, i.e. analysing the state of the application and interacting with it by firing events. The pattern matching tries to identify the presence of UI patterns based on a catalogue of patterns. When a UI Pattern from the catalogue is detected, a test strategy is applied (testing). These test strategies are called UI Test Patterns. These three phases work in an iterative way: the patterns are identified and tested between firing of events, i.e. the process alternates between exploring the application and testing the UI Patterns. The process is dynamic and fully automatic not requiring any previous knowledge about the application under test. This paper presents the results of an experiment studying the reliability of the results obtained by iMPAcT. The experiment involved 25 applications found on Google Play Store and concludes that iMPAcT is successful in identifying failures in the tested patterns and that the degree of certainty of an identified failure being an actual failure is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In this paper, we offer a novel approach for enabling developers to follow explicit programming strategies that describe how an expert tackles a common programming problem. We define explicit programming strategies, grounding our definition in prior work both within software engineering and in other professions which have adopted more explicit procedures for problem solving. We then present a novel notation called Roboto and a novel strategy tracker tool that explicitly represent programming strategies and frame executing strategies as a collaborative effort between human abilities to make decisions and computer abilities to structure process and persist information. In a formative evaluation, 28 software developers of varying expertise completed a design task and a debugging task. We found that, compared to developers who are free to choose their own strategies, developers given explicit strategies experienced their work as more organized, systematic, and predictable, but also more constrained. Developers using explicit strategies were objectively more successful at the design and debugging tasks. We discuss the implications of Roboto and these findings, envisioning a thriving ecosystem of explicit strategies that accelerate and improve developers' programming problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding and fixing buggy code is an important and cost-intensive maintenance task, and static analysis (SA) is one of the methods developers use to perform it. SA tools warn developers about potential bugs by scanning their source code for commonly occurring bug patterns, thus giving those developers opportunities to fix the warnings (potential bugs) before they release the software. Typically, SA tools scan for general bug patterns that are common to any software project (such as null pointer dereference), and not for project specific patterns. However, past research has pointed to this lack of customizability as a severe limiting issue in SA. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose an approach called Ammonia, which is based on statically analyzing changes across the development history of a project, as a means to identify project-specific bug patterns. Furthermore, the bug patterns identified by our tool do not relate to just one developer or one specific commit, they reflect the project as a whole and compliment the warnings from other SA tools that identify general bug patterns. Herein, we report on the application of our implemented tool and approach to four Java projects: Ant, Camel, POI, and Wicket. The results obtained show that our tool could detect 19 project specific bug patterns across those four projects. Next, through manual analysis, we determined that six of those change patterns were actual bugs and submitted pull requests based on those bug patterns. As a result, five of the pull requests were merged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As most software systems, libraries and frameworks also evolve, which may break existing clients. However, the main reasons to introduce breaking changes in APIs are unclear. Therefore, in this paper, we first report the results of an almost 4-month long field study with popular Java libraries and frameworks. We configured an infrastructure to observe all changes in these libraries and to detect breaking changes shortly after their introduction in the code. We detected possible breaking changes in 61 projects. After identifying breaking changes, we asked the developers to explain the reasons behind their decision to change the APIs. By analyzing the developers' answers, we report that breaking changes are mostly motivated by the need to implement new features, by the desire to make the APIs simpler and with fewer elements, and to improve maintainability. To complement this first study, we describe a second study, including the analysis of 110 Stack Overflow posts related to breaking changes. We reveal that breaking changes have an important impact on clients, since 45% of the questions are from clients asking how to overcome specific breaking changes; they are also common in other ecosystems—JavaScript,.NET, etc. We conclude by providing suggestions to language designers, tool builders, software engineering researchers, and API developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software developers have benefited from various sources of knowledge such as forums, question-and-answer sites, and social media platforms to help them in various tasks. Extracting software-related knowledge from different platforms involves many challenges. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction tasks by performing cross-platform analysis. Our approach is based on transfer representation learning and word embedding, leveraging information extracted from a source platform which contains rich domain-related content. The information extracted is then used to solve tasks in another platform (considered as target platform) with less domain-related content. We first build a word embedding model as a representation learned from the source platform, and use the model to improve the performance of knowledge extraction tasks in the target platform. We experiment with Software Engineering Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow as source platforms, and two different target platforms, i.e., Twitter and YouTube. Our experiments show that our approach improves performance of existing work for the tasks of identifying software-related tweets and helpful YouTube comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In search-based software engineering, one actively studied problem is the optimal software product selection from a feature model using multiple (usually more than three) optimization objectives simultaneously. This can be represented as a many-objective optimization problem. The primary goal of solving this problem is to search for diverse and high-quality valid products as rapidly as possible. Previous studies have shown that combining search-based techniques with satisfiability (SAT) solvers was promising for achieving this goal, but it remained open that how different solvers affect the performance of a search algorithm, and that whether the ways to randomize solutions in the solvers make a difference. Moreover, we may need further investigation on the necessity of mixing different types of SAT solving techniques. In this paper, we address the above open research questions by performing a series of empirical studies on 21 features models, most of which are reverse-engineered from industrial software product lines. We examine four conflict-driven clause learning solvers, two stochastic local search solvers, and two different ways to randomize solutions. Experimental results suggest that the performance can be indeed affected by different SAT solvers, and by the ways to randomize solutions in the solvers. This study serves as a practical guideline for choosing and tuning SAT solvers for the many-objective optimal software product selection problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the computer industry. It offers a history of Computer Science and software engineering which concentrates on virtual reality and related areas. The author shares the realization and the idea of abstraction that computer programming is not an easy job. The author relates his experience with Computer Science and software engineering during his undergraduate project at the University of Limerick on the subject of software development where the book changed the direction of his career for both its technical content and for sentimental reasons.

Abstract  This paper discusses some initial investigations into the application of genetic programming technology as a vehicle for re-examining some existing approaches within the software life-cycle. Specifically, it outlines a new direction in production techniques—software cloning from executable specifications or source code. It explores the possibility and advantages of producing a system from its external interactions. To allow this production to be automatic, the system assumes that it can view (and potentially manipulate) these external interactions of the original system; and hence it assumes the existence of either an executable specification or the source code—an object to assist in the generation of the external interactions; i.e. the system is treated as a black-box. Although the generation and application of software clones is relatively unexplored, it is believed that this is a fundamental technology that can have many different applications within a software engineering environment. For example, software clones could be used in: complexity measurement, software testing and software fault tolerance. Clearly, for these clones to be usable, their production needs to be automated. An interesting approach to this automatic production or generation problem is the application of evolutionary-based Genetic Programming (GP). Using the paradigms of best fit, selection, crossover and mutation, a number of clones, satisfying specific requirements, can be automatically generated. In general, GP is a flexible and powerful algorithm suitable for solving a variety of different problems. This paper presents the results of studies that have been conducted in order to answer questions related to feasibility of using GP for clone generation: what features of GP are important? What works and what does not? How can the GP be “tuned” for the problem? The results have been used to draw a set of suggestions and conclusions that indicate possible usability of GP-based approach to automatic generation of clones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verification of concurrent systems through an exhaustive traversal of the state space suffers from the infamous state-space-explosion problem, caused by the many interleavings of actions of different processes in the system. Partial-order reduction is a well-known technique to tackle this problem. In this paper, we present an enhancement of the partial-order-reduction scheme of Holzmann and Peled that uses the hierarchical structure of concurrent systems. Our technique tries to contain dependencies between actions within clusters of processes, capitalizing on the independence of actions in different clusters to reduce the state space to be verified while preserving properties of interest. The paper starts with a formalization of the partial-order-reduction technique and continues with a presentation of our enhanced technique, including a correctness argument. The new technique has been implemented in the verification tool SPIN. We present implementation details, some small experiments, and one larger case study using a cache coherency protocol. The experimental results are encouraging. Compared to standard partial-order reduction, improvements in reductions are obtained from 21% up to 98% in the number of states and 34% up to 99% in the number of state transitions.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-time systems, dynamic inconsistencies of software are hardly detected, diagnosed and handled. A built-in test (BIT) method is developed to cope with software dynamic inconsistency. BIT is defined as a new kind of software testing which is explicitly described in object-oriented source code as member functions. BITs can be activated at any designed moment at run-time to detect, diagnose and handle software dynamic inconsistencies. This paper develops a new approach to cope with software dynamic inconsistencies at run-time by BITs. In this paper, the concept of BITs is introduced. The standard structures which incorporate BITs into conventional object-oriented software are analysed. Reuse methodologies for BITs in OO software are developed at object and system levels. A case study is provided for showing how to create BIT and how to inherit and reuse BITs in OO programming. Methods for incorporating BITs into OO software at object, class and system levels are provided. An approach to dynamic inconsistency control by BITs is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many statistical methods for estimating software quality rely on representative testing: they assume a program is tested in an environment that simulates the environment where it will be used. Often, however, a software tester's aim is to uncover defects as soon as possible, and representative testing may not be the best way to do this. Instead, tests are often selected according to some plan that is believed to result in an efficient but thorough examination of the software's behavior. This raises the question of how practical measurements of software quality, like software probability-of-failure, can be obtained from directed testing. In this paper, we discuss some factors affecting the ability of directed tests to predict software quality when quality is measured in the environment where the software operates, but the directed tests do not simulate that environment. We consider a number of ways to measure the power of a directed test method, and show how these affect the tester's ability to predict software quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the development of Register Automaton learning, an enhancement of active automata learning to deal with infinite-state systems. We will revisit the precursor techniques and influences, which in total span over more than a decade. A large share of this development was guided and motivated by the increasingly popular application of grammatical inference techniques in the field of software engineering. We specifically focus on a key problem to achieve practicality in this field: the adequate treatment of data values ranging over infinite domains, a major source of undecidability. Starting with the first case studies, in which data was completely abstracted away, we revisit different steps towards dealing with data explicitly at a model level: we discuss Mealy machines as a model for systems with (data) output, automated alphabet abstraction refinement techniques as a two-dimensional extension of the partition-refinement based approach of active automata learning to also inferring optimal alphabet abstractions, and Register Mealy Machines, which can be regarded as programs restricted to data-independent data processing as it is typical for protocols or interface programs. We are convinced that this development will significantly contribute to paving the road for active automata learning to become a technology of high practical importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of software systems, but are often neglected during the development process due to the considerable manual effort required to produce them. In response to this problem, numerous techniques have been developed that seek to automate the model generation task with the aid of increasingly accurate algorithms from the domain of Machine Learning. From an empirical perspective, these are extremely challenging to compare; there are many factors that are difficult to control (e.g. the richness of the input and the complexity of subject systems), and numerous practical issues that are just as troublesome (e.g. tool availability). This paper describes the StaMinA ( State Machine Inference Approaches) competiton, that was designed to address these problems. The competition attracted numerous submissions, many of which were improved or adapted versions of techniques that had not been subjected to extensive empirical evaluations, and had not been evaluated with respect to their ability to infer models of software systems. This paper shows how many of these techniques substantially improve on the state of the art, providing insights into some of the factors that could underpin the success of the best techniques. In a more general sense it demonstrates the potential for competitions to act as a useful basis for empirical software engineering by (a) spurring the development of new techniques and (b) facilitating their comparative evaluation to an extent that would usually be prohibitively challenging without the active participation of the developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Object Constraint Language (OCL) is a high-level, object-oriented language for contractual system specifications. Despite its expressivity, OCL does not provide primitives for a compact specification of invariability. In this paper, problems with invariability specification are listed and some weaknesses of existing solutions are pointed out. The question of invariability specification is addressed and a simple but expressive extension of OCL is proposed. It allows a view-oriented specification of invariability constraints, whereby we restrict the notion of view to reducts based on order-sorted algebras. The semantics of this extension is defined in terms of standard OCL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of our experiments in integrating modern software engineering tools and techniques with the process of developing parallel applications for distributed memory architectures. The main goal was to determine the methods that have the potential of reducing the complexities associated with explicit parallelization. We experimented with template metaprogramming, aspect-oriented programming, program transformation engine, and a domain-specific language called Hi-PaL. The pros and cons of using each technique for explicit parallelization are presented in this paper. Our experiments demonstrate that through a combination of modern software engineering tools and techniques, the effort involved in explicit parallelization can be reduced by 90 % without any significant loss in performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of writing this Three Year Vision paper is threefold. Firstly, it briefly recaps the progress Semat has made thus far; secondly, it lays out the future directions for people working actively within the Semat community; thirdly, it provides the background for seeking funding support from agencies, such as the European Community and the like. Funding support is necessary to sustain the ongoing activities of Semat and its growth into a broader community effort, as most people working within Semat are volunteers. As such, the paper may be both too much and too little for the wider supporter base. However, we intend to make our work fully transparent, hence, we publish it widely. We seek feedback and comments from supporters and signatories in order to improve the vision. In this context, other companion papers are being written to better address the specific needs for the practitioners, the industry and the academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss means for describing domains. We do so on the background of the example of part I of the present (Part II) paper and in its discussion. The discussion amounts to a proposal for a base description ontology. The discussion borders between computer science and an emerging Philosophy of Informatics. As such it is very tentative. The present discussion might inspire better minds to put this border area on a stronger footing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Code cloning has been very often indicated as a bad software development practice. However, many studies appearing in the literature indicate that this is not always the case. In fact, either changes occurring in cloned code are consistently propagated, or cloning is used as a sort of templating strategy, where cloned source code fragments evolve independently. This paper (a) proposes an automatic approach to classify the evolution of source code clone fragments, and (b) reports a fine-grained analysis of clone evolution in four different Java and C software systems, aimed at investigating to what extent clones are consistently propagated or they evolve independently. Also, the paper investigates the relationship between the presence of clone evolution patterns and other characteristics such as clone radius, clone size and the kind of change the clones underwent, i.e., corrective maintenance or enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Program slicing is a program analysis and transformation technique that has been successfully used in a wide range of applications including program comprehension, debugging, maintenance, testing, and verification. However, there are only few fully featured implementations of program slicing that are available for industrial applications or academic research. In particular, very little tool support exists for slicing programs written in modern object-oriented languages such as Java, C#, or C++. In this paper, we present Indus—a robust framework for analyzing and slicing concurrent Java programs, and Kaveri—a feature-rich Eclipse-based GUI front end for Indus slicing. For Indus, we describe the underlying tool architecture, analysis components, and program dependence capabilities required for slicing. In addition, we present a collection of advanced features useful for effective slicing of Java programs including calling-context sensitive slicing, scoped slicing, control slicing, and chopping. For Kaveri, we discuss the design goals and basic capabilities of the graphical facilities integrated into a Java development environment to present the slicing information. This paper is an extended version of a tool demonstration paper presented at the International Conference on Fundamental Aspects of Software Engineering (FASE 2005). Thus, the paper highlights tool capabilities and engineering issues and refers the reader to other papers for technical details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debugging is a laborious, manual activity that often involves the repetition of common operations. Ideally, users should be able to describe these repetitious operations as little programs. Debuggers should therefore be programmable, or scriptable. The operating environment of these scripts, however, imposes interesting design challenges on the programming language in which these scripts are written. This paper presents our design of a language for scripting debuggers. The language offers powerful primitives that can precisely and concisely capture many important debugging and comprehension metaphors. The paper also describes a pair of debuggers, one for Java and the other for Scheme, built in accordance with these principles. The paper includes concrete examples of applying this debugger to programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As devices become smaller and wireless networking technologies improve, the popularity of mobile computing continues to rise. In today's world, many consider devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops as essential tools. As these and other devices become increasingly independent of the wired infrastructure, new kinds of applications that assume an ad hoc network infrastructure are being deployed. Their development forces software engineers to revisit well understood problems in a setting in which existing solutions are no longer working. This paper illustrates one such attempt by focusing on an important problem in distributed computing, termination detection in diffusing computations, in an ad hoc network environment. We formulate an algorithmic solution amenable to usage in mobile ad hoc networks. Along the way, we highlight several important software engineering concerns one must address and design strategies one might employ in a mobile setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main motivation for the development of the OMG's XML Metadata Interchange Format (XMI) was the need to have a standard way for UML tools to interchange UML models. However, the fact that UML models, saved as XML documents, are now accessible to standard XML tools, opens up new possibilities to which less attention has so far been paid. This paper discusses how XMI can be exploited for performing model analysis and housekeeping tasks and for the integration of third party or in-house tools. With the help of examples we focus on what can be achieved with small-scale XMI programming by a single developer in hours rather than days. We suggest that this new capability may have important and positive implications for the future of UML modelling using tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The real-time process algebra (RTPA) is a set of new mathematical notations for formally describing system architectures, and static and dynamic behaviors. It is recognized that the specification of software behaviors is a three-dimensional problem known as: (i) mathematical operations, (ii) event/process timing, and (iii) memory manipulations. Conventional formal methods in software engineering were designed to describe the 1-D (type (0) or 2-D (types (i) and (iii)) static behaviors of software systems via logic, set and type theories. However, they are inadequate to address the 3-D problems in real-time systems. A new notation system that is capable to describe and specify the 3-D real-time behaviors, the real-time process algebra (RTPA), is developed in this paper to meet the fundamental requirements in software engineering. RTPA is designed as a coherent software engineering notation system and a formal engineering method for addressing the 3-D problems in software system specification, refinement, and implementation, particularly for real-time and embedded systems. In this paper, the RTPA meta-processes, algebraic relations, system architectural notations, and a set of fundamental primary and abstract data types are described. On the basis of the RTPA notations, a system specification method and a refinement scheme of RTPA are developed. Then, a case study on a telephone switching system is provided, which demonstrates the expressive power of RTPA on formal specification of both software system architectures and behaviors. RTPA elicits and models 32 algebraic notations, which are the common core of existing formal methods and modem programming languages. The extremely small set of formal notations has been proven sufficient for modeling and specifying real-time systems, their architecture, and static/dynamic behaviors in real-world software engineering environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most intractable problems in software is getting engineers to consistently use effective methods. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has worked on this problem for a number of years and has developed effective methods for addressing it. This paper describes these methods and shows what they have accomplished with several hundred students and working engineers. After first describing the problem of changing engineers' practices, the paper discusses the logic engineers typically follow in deciding what methods to use. Next is a description of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP). Finally, the implications of SEI's experiences with the PSP and TSP are described, with particular emphasis on software engineering and computer science education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data redundancy methods evaluate the output of a program on a given input by examining the outputs produced by the same program on additional inputs. This papers explores the use of data redundancy to detect and/or tolerate failures in differential equation solvers. Our first goal is to show that data redundancy techniques are applicable to a wide class of differential equations. Our second task is to identify circumstances in which an independence model of the sort used in program checking can be exploited to build highly reliable solvers from moderately reliable components. We conclude with illustrative examples of applying various data redundancy techniques to a standard differential equation solver. The method has potential for critical systems in which the application's control laws are specified as sets of differential equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on previous studies on programming errors and their causes, the presented paper investigates errors that application engineers in the area of machine and plant automation make while creating either function block diagrams, plcML [an adaption of the unified modelling language (UML)] or modAT4rMS code (a newly developed modelling language that adapts and combines aspects of UML and SysML). A laboratory-based study with 52 mechatronics apprentices and electrical engineering technicians with knowhow in manufacturing system design but comparably undeveloped programming skills has been conducted, in which the subjects' errors and think-aloud statements during code creation were recorded. In a subsequent step, these data have been analysed by the cognitive causes of the coding errors applying the skill-rules-knowledge framework. As a result, a taxonomy of errors is presented. Results indicate that most of the errors in the subjects' code are due to insufficient understanding of the notation's syntax, problems with the rules of encapsulation, the creation of modules and finally with the creation of variants and aggregations, which are all located at the rule-based level. Errors at the skill-based level mainly occurred during behavioural modelling with modAT4rMS. It is argued that the provided insights can be used for improving education on programmable logic controller (PLC) languages and for the design of tools that support PLC programmers at detecting and fixing errors within their code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic prediction tools play a key role in enabling the application of non-functional requirements analysis, to simplify the selection and the assembly of components for component-based software systems, and in reducing the need for strong mathematical skills for software designers. By exploiting the paradigm of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), it is possible to automatically transform design models into analytical models, thus enabling formal property verification. MDE is the core paradigm of the KlaperSuite framework presented in this paper, which exploits the KLAPER pivot language to fill the gap between design and analysis of component-based systems for reliability properties. KlaperSuite is a family of tools empowering designers with the ability to capture and analyze quality of service views of their systems, by building a one-click bridge towards a number of established verification instruments. In this article, we concentrate on the reliability-prediction capabilities of KlaperSuite and we evaluate them with respect to several case studies from literature and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the development of one software verification tool is often seen as a difficult task, the realization of a tool combining various verification techniques is even more complex. This paper presents an innovative tool for verification of C programs called Sante (Static ANalysis and TEsting). We show how several tools based on heterogeneous techniques such as abstract interpretation, dependency analysis, program slicing, constraint solving and test generation can be combined within one tool. We describe the integration of these tools and discuss particular aspects of each underlying tool that are beneficial for the whole combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long tradition in design of discussing materials and the craft of making artefacts. 'Smart' and interactive materials affected what constitutes a material. Interaction design is a design activity that creates the appearance and behaviour of information technology, challenged by the illusiveness of interactive materials. With the increased design space of ubiquitous devices, designers can no longer rely on a design process based on known interaction idioms, especially for innovative highly interactive designs. This impedes the design process, because non-interactive materials, by which designers create sketches, storyboards, and mock-up prototypes, do not provide the essential talkbacks needed to make reliable assessments of the design characteristics. Without a well-defined design, the engineering process of artefacts has unclear ends, which are not encompassed in the rational epistemology of engineering. To value the experiential qualities of these artefacts, the prototypes need to be interactive and crafted in code. This paper investigates the materiality of information technology, specifically programming language code from which interactive artefacts are made. A study of users of programming languages investigates how they describe programming language code as a material. If you have a material, it is reasonable, because of the tradition in the material and craft fields, to say you have a craft. Thus, considering code a design material allows the metaphor of craft to be used for the activity of programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. This paper presents new models, methods, and tools developed as a part of a fundamental project in generative programming (GP). They include the theory of object-component programming, theory of interaction of programs, systems, and environments, an original technology of designing variable and high-quality systems and families out of ready-made reusable components, tools for supporting a spectrum of simple technologies for developing separate elements of system families and assembling them, ensuring of the interoperability of programs, systems, and environments, and an instrumental and technical GP complex for e-learning the C# and Java languages and a university course on software engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modelling attribute transition systems, classes of their states can be described in a given signature of functional and predicate symbols. A procedure is developed for transforming such formulas by assignment operators and the obtained formulas are proved to correspond to strongest postconditions. A peculiarity of this paper is that functional-type attributes can be used in specifying transition systems, in particular, their array-type attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a systematic strategy for migrating crosscutting concerns in existing object-oriented systems to aspect-oriented programming solutions. The proposed strategy consists of four steps: mining, exploration, documentation and refactoring of crosscutting concerns. We discuss in detail a new approach to refactoring to aspect-oriented programming that is fully integrated with our strategy, and apply the whole strategy to an object-oriented system, namely the JHotDraw framework. Moreover, we present a method to semi-automatically perform the aspect-introducing refactorings based on identified crosscutting concern sorts which is supported by a prototype tool called SAIR. We perform an exploratory case study in which we apply this tool on the same object-oriented system and compare its results with the results of manual migration in order to assess the feasibility of automated aspect refactoring. Both the refactoring tool SAIR and the results of the manual migration are made available as open-source, the latter providing the largest aspect-introducing refactoring available to date. We report on our experiences with conducting both case studies and reflect on the success and challenges of the migration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State machines, represented by statecharts or state machine diagrams, are an important formalism for behavioural modelling. According to the research literature, the most popular statechart formalisms appear to be Classical, UML, and that implemented by R hapsody. These three formalisms seem to be very similar; however, there are several key syntactic and semantic differences. These differences are enough that a model written in one formalism could be ill-formed in another formalism. Worse, a model from one formalism might actually be well-formed in another, but be interpreted differently due to the semantic differences. This paper summarizes the results of an informal comparative study of these three formalisms with the help of several illustrative examples. We present a classification of the differences according to the nature of potential problems caused by each difference. In addition, for each difference we discuss how translation between formalisms can be achieved, if at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the impact of team size on the software development effort. Using field data of over 200 software projects from various industries, we empirically test the impact of team size and other variables—such as software size in function points, ICASE tool and programming language type—on software development effort. Our results indicate that software size in function points significantly impacts the software development effort. The two-way interactions between function points and use of ICASE tool, and function points and language type are significant as well. Additionally, the interactions between team size and programming language type, and team size and use of ICASE tool were all significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract specifications in the form of pre-and postconditions are widely used in software engineering for formal description of interfaces of software components. On the one hand, such specifications are convenient for the developers since they can easily be attached to the system architecture. On the other hand, test oracles verifying conformance of the behavior of the target system to the specifications can automatically be generated from them. In the paper, it is suggested to use contract specifications for representing requirements and for functional testing of hardware models developed in languages such as VHDL, Verilog, SystemC, System Verilog, etc. An approach to specification of such systems is proposed and compared with the existing methods of hardware specification. An experience of its practical use is described. The approach is based on the UniTESK testing technology developed at the Institute for System Programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During software evolution, information about changes between different versions of a program is useful for a number of software engineering tasks. For example, configuration-management systems can use change information to assess possible conflicts among updates from different users. For another example, in regression testing, knowledge about which parts of a program are unchanged can help in identifying test cases that need not be rerun. For many of these tasks, a purely syntactic differencing may not provide enough information for the task to be performed effectively. This problem is especially relevant in the case of object-oriented software, for which a syntactic change can have subtle and unforeseen effects. In this paper, we present a technique for comparing object-oriented programs that identifies both differences and correspondences between two versions of a program. The technique is based on a representation that handles object-oriented features and, thus, can capture the behavior of object-oriented programs. We also present JDIFF, a tool that implements the technique for Java programs. Finally, we present the results of four empirical studies, performed on many versions of two medium-sized subjects, that show the efficiency and effectiveness of the technique when used on real programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed systems are often modeled by objects that run concurrently, each with its own processor, and communicate by synchronous remote method calls. This may be satisfactory for tightly coupled systems, but in the distributed setting synchronous external calls lead to much waiting; at best resulting in inefficient use of processor capacity, at worst resulting in deadlock. Furthermore, it is difficult to combine active and passive behavior in concurrent objects. This paper proposes an object-oriented solution to these problems by means of asynchronous method calls and conditional processor release points. Although at the cost of additional internal nondeterminism in the objects, this approach seems attractive in asynchronous or unreliable environments. The concepts are integrated in a small object-oriented language with an operational semantics defined in rewriting logic, and illustrated by examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As software technologies advance, the software community uses the newest and most powerful technology and associated notations. However, mapping software with a set of notations that would survive the test of time is becoming increasingly difficult. A survey of current methodologies indicates that half-lives of various software notations are short. The dependence of software notations on programming languages and environment specific methodologies often makes these notations obsolete. In this paper, development of a standard set of software notations that is independent of programming paradigms, yet extensible enough to accommodate programming needs, is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of computers and complex software is pervasive in archaeology, yet their role in the analytical pipeline is rarely exposed for other researchers to inspect or reuse. This limits the progress of archaeology because researchers cannot easily reproduce each other's work to verify or extend it. Four general principles of reproducible research that have emerged in other fields are presented. An archaeological case study is described that shows how each principle can be implemented using freely available software. The costs and benefits of implementing reproducible research are assessed. The primary benefit, of sharing data in particular, is increased impact via an increased number of citations. The primary cost is the additional time required to enhance reproducibility, although the exact amount is difficult to quantify. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When interacting with source control management system, developers often commit unrelated or loosely related code changes in a single transaction. When analyzing version histories, such tangled changes will make all changes to all modules appear related, possibly compromising the resulting analyses through noise and bias. In an investigation of five open-source Java projects, we found between 7 % and 20 % of all bug fixes to consist of multiple tangled changes. Using a multi-predictor approach to untangle changes, we show that on average at least 16.6 % of all source files are incorrectly associated with bug reports. These incorrect bug file associations seem to not significantly impact models classifying source files to have at least one bug or no bugs. But our experiments show that untangling tangled code changes can result in more accurate regression bug prediction models when compared to models trained and tested on tangled bug datasets-in our experiments, the statistically significant accuracy improvements lies between 5 % and 200 %. We recommend better change organization to limit the impact of tangled changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Checking the correctness of distributed systems is one of the most difficult and urgent problems in software engineering. A combined toolset for the verification of real-time distributed systems (RTDS) is described. RTDSs are specified as statecharts in the Universal Modeling Language (UML). The semantics of statecharts is defined by means of hierarchical timed automata. The combined toolset consists of a UML statechart editor, a verification tool for model checking networks of real-time automata in UPPAAL, and a translator of UML statecharts into networks of timed automata. The focus is on the translation algorithm from UML statecharts into networks of hierarchical timed automata. To illustrate the proposed approach to the verification of RTDSs, a toy example of a real-time crossroad traffic control system is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]