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Highly configurable software systems allow the efficient and reliable development of similar software variants based on a common code base. The C preprocessor CPP, which uses source code annotations that enable conditional compilation, is a simple yet powerful text-based tool for implementing such systems. However, since annotations interfere with the actual source code, the CPP has often been accused of being a source of errors and increased maintenance effort. In our research, we have been curious about whether high-level patterns of CPP misuse (i.e., code smells) can be identified, how they evolve, and whether they really hinder maintenance. To support this research, we started a simple tool which over the years evolved into a powerful toolchain. This evolution was possible because our toolchain is not monolithic, but is composed of many small tools connected by scripts and communicating via files. Moreover, we reused existing tools whenever possible and developed our own solutions only as a last resort. In this paper, we report our experiences of building this toolchain. In particular, we present design decisions we made and lessons learned, both positive and negative ones. We hope that this not only stimulates discussion and (in the best case) attracts more researchers in using our tools. Rather, we also want to encourage others to put emphasis on building tools instead of considering them "yet another research prototype".

The complexity and difficulty for designing and developing automation programs based on the IEC 61131–3 [1] is continuously increasing. With the VDI/VDE/NAMUR 2658 [2] a new level of complexity will be reached - control modules with more complex interfaces, services as functional capsulation in process operations and interdependencies to other unknown up- or downstream modules. In these applications, the proven procedural approach reaches its limits. The object-oriented paradigm could be the solution. However the object-oriented extension of [1] is not supported in many available plc development tools. This results in a low acceptance and low experience in object-oriented thinking by plc developers. This paper will be focused on an object-oriented motivated transformation of design principles and patterns into Structured Text. The results are demonstrated in form of a best practice implementation for programs compliant to [2]. The presented approach does not use any kind of supportive or generating tools, it's based completely on the possibilities of IEC 61131–3.

Due to the rise of diverse finite element software, the needs to understand each of the software interface for optimization of the software usage is increasing among new users. Many researchers had roughly done their software explanation through a few simple methods such as clarifying the software user interface and framework to enhance user benefit with their software. They also provide conclusion for the explanation with a proper justification of an analysis or through interviewing user experiences. The three steps had been proven to be effective in term of giving recognition of software to new users with different background field. This paper will review the standard definition of a graphical user interface that many existing finite element software had completed and how it was exposed to the user. Also, how the software framework function for user to obtain a reliable data out of it and finally the validation of the enlighten framework and GUI for users ease in each model analysis.

Fundamentals of Software Engineering (extended versions of selected papers of FSEN 2015) Preface

TileDB is a system for managing data that are naturally represented as dense or sparse multi-dimensional arrays. TileDB's primary goal is massive scale, where data need to be stored persistently at a low cost, while allowing rapid access during parallel computation. Contrary to traditional data management systems, TileDB is an embeddable C library that can easily be integrated with various higher-level programming languages and scientific computing tools. It supports persistent storage on various backends such as POSIX filesystems, HDFS, Amazon S3, and more. TileDB has been successfully used in genomics as the storage engine of GenomicsDB, a project maintained by the Intel Health and Life Sciences group that is currently integrated with the Broad Institute's GATK4. This paper reviews the data model, architecture and key design principles of TileDB, and outlines our future vision for using TileDB in important scientific applications.

This paper takes the management system of paper machine’s disassembly and assembly as research objects, and introduces RFID technology as well as the application of RFID. Then it establishes basic information management of paper machine, marking information management, installation information management, serial communication and other functional modules. The monitoring system adopts VC6.0 and SQL as the original developing tools. At first, it needs to analyse and construct system functional modules of paper machine, then it designs engineering framework-a kind of visual user management interface- in VC platform. Finally, it does the mapping coefficient and data transmitting from the engineering framework to database by ADO database access.

This technical white paper describes the design and initial implementation of a virtual environment for straightforward and robust data analysis intended for students and researchers acting in science and technology. The Virtual Laboratory for Advanced Data Analysis (VLADA) aims to fill a growing demand for scientific mathematical and statistical tools validated and coupled with appropriate high performance computing infrastructure into a single computing environment available on the Web using advanced parallel processing and object-oriented programming. This work proposes to provide: (i) a detailed study on the feasibility of building a such virtual environment with large international access, and (ii) a description of a preliminary single prototype including a standard method for advanced time series analysis. The main steps taken to develop such a laboratory, including preliminary software engineering implementation, are shown in this paper.

Modern enterprises operate in an unprecedented regulatory environment where increasing regulation and heavy penalties on non-compliance have placed regulatory compliance among the topmost concerns of enterprises worldwide. Previous research in the field of compliance has established that the manual specification of the regulations used by GRC frameworks not only fails to ensure their proper coverage but also negatively affects the turnaround time both in proving and maintaining the compliance. Our key contribution in this paper is an implementation of a controlled natural English like (domain-specific) language that can be used by domain experts to specify regulations for automated compliance checking. We demonstrate this language using examples from industry regulations in banking and financial services domain.

Architecture models mainly have three functions; 1) document, 2) analyze, and 3) improve the system under consideration. All three functions have suffered from being timeconsuming and expensive, mainly due to being manual processes in need of hard to find expertise. Recent work has however automated both the data collection and the analysis. In order for enterprise architecture modeling to finally become free of manual labor the design function also needs to be automated. In this position paper we propose the Automatic Designer. A solution that employs machine learning techniques to realize the design of (near) optimal architecture solutions. This particular implementation is focused on security analysis, but could easily be extended to other topics.

Open source software (OSS) is a software product with the source code made public so that anyone can read, analyze, and change or improve the code. The use of this software is under a license, like Apache, GNU, MIT, Mozilla Public, and Eclipse Public License. Open source software development (OSSD) provides high quality assurance through user testing and peer reviews. The quality of these products depends on the size of the product community. This paper discusses the stakeholders of the OSS community, the quality assurance frameworks and models proposed in some studies, some statistics about OSS, the problems that affect the quality of OSSD, and the advantages and disadvantages of OSS compared to closed source software. This allows us to understand how we can achieve and improve the quality assurance and quality control of OSSD.

The Model Driven Development of a generic control engine for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has led to the development of a line of products to handle and document models. In the long run the problem is to strike the proper balance between genericity and specificity, between the return in productivity provided by code generation and the rigidities inherent to the underlying models.

Software systems naturally evolve, and this evolution often brings design problems that cause system degradation. Architectural smells are typical symptoms of such problems, and several of these smells are related to undesired dependencies among modules. The early detection of these smells is important for developers, because they can plan ahead for maintenance or refactoring efforts, thus preventing system degradation. Existing tools for identifying architectural smells can detect the smells once they exist in the source code. This means that their undesired dependencies are already created. In this work, we explore a forward-looking approach that is able to infer groups of likely module dependencies that can anticipate architectural smells in a future system version. Our approach considers the current module structure as a network, along with information from previous versions, and applies link prediction techniques (from the field of social network analysis). In particular, we focus on dependency-related smells, such as Cyclic Dependency and Hub-like Dependency, which fit well with the link prediction model. An initial evaluation with two open-source projects shows that, under certain considerations, the predictions of our approach are satisfactory. Furthermore, the approach can be extended to other types of dependency-based smells or metrics.

Efficient automatic verification of real world embedded software with numerous properties is a challenge. Existing techniques verify a sufficient subset of properties by identifying implication relations between their verification outcomes. We believe this is expensive and propose a novel complementary approach called grouping. Grouping does not consider the verification outcomes but uses data and control flow characteristics of the program to create disjoint groups of properties verifiable one group at a time.We present three grouping techniques, a framework, and experiments over open source and industrial applications to support our thesis. The experiments show a high gain in performance of a few state-of-the-art tools. This led to the integration of grouping into the verification process of an automotive software manufacturer.

Most of today's industries, from engineering to agriculture to health, are run on software. In such a context, ensuring software quality play an important role in most of current working environment and have a direct impact in any scientific and technical discipline. Software maintenance and testing have the crucial goal to find or discover possible software bugs (or defects) as early as possible, enabling software quality assurance. However, software maintenance and testing are very expensive and time-consuming activities for developers. For this reason, in the last years, several researchers in the field of Software Engineering (SE) devoted their effort in conceiving tools for boosting developers productivity during such development, maintenance and testing tasks. In this talk, I will first discuss some empirical work we performed to understand the main socio-technical challenges developers face when joining a new software project. I will discuss how to address them with the use of appropriate recommender systems aimed at supporting developers during program comprehension and maintenance tasks. Then, I'll show how Summarization Techniques are an ideal technology for supporting developers when performing testing and debugging activities. Finally, I will summarize the main research advances, the current open challenges/problems and possible future directions to exploit for boosting developers productivity.

According to the data from the Scopus publication database, as analyzed in several recent studies, more than 70,000 papers have been published in the area of Software Engineering (SE) since late 1960’s. According to our recent work, 43% of those papers have received no citations at all. Since citations are the most commonly used metric for measuring research (academic) impact, these figures raise questions (doubts) about the (non-existing) impact of such a large set of papers. It is a reality that typical academic reward systems encourage researchers to publish more papers and do not place a major emphasis on research impact. To shed light on the issue of volume (quantity) versus citation-based impact of SE research papers, we conduct and report in this paper a quantitative bibliometrics assessment in four aspects: (1) quantity versus impact of different paper types (e.g., conference versus journal papers), (2) ratios of uncited (non-impactful) papers, (3) quantity versus impact of papers originating from different countries, and (4) quantity versus impact of papers by each of the top-10 authors (in terms of number of papers). To achieve the above objective, we conducted a quantitative exploratory bibliometrics assessment, comprised of four research questions, to assess quantity versus impact of SE papers with respect to the aspects discussed above. We extracted the data through a systematic, automated and repeatable process from the Scopus paper database, which we also used in two previous papers. Our results show that the distribution of SE publications has a major inequality in terms of impact overall, and also when categorized in terms of the above four aspects. The situation in the SE literature is similar to the other areas of science as studied by previous bibliometrics studies. Also, among our results is the fact that journal articles and conference papers have been cited 12.6 and 3.6 times on average, confirming the expectation that journal articles have more impact, in general, than conference papers. Also, papers originated from English-speaking countries have in general more visibility and impact (and consequently citations) when compared to papers originated from non-English-speaking countries. Our results have implications for improvement of academic reward systems, which nowadays mainly encourage researchers to publish more papers and usually neglect research impact. Also, our results can help researchers in non-English-speaking countries to consider improvements to increase their research impact of their upcoming papers., Vahid Garousi was partially supported by several internal grants provided by the Hacettepe University and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). Joao M. Fernandes was supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013.

Several paper-based approaches and software tools have been developed to support Participatory Design (PD) in research and practice. However, a formal comparison of paper and software tool is missing in the PD literature. To address this gap we present an empirical study with 28 Informatics students comparing a paper-based approach with our digital tool PDotCapturer. Results show a slight advantage of paper regarding quantitative results and a significant statistical difference in one of the 18 qualities tested (regarding aesthetics [e.g. symmetrical, creative], usability [e.g. user control and freedom, flexibility and efficiency of use], and relevancy [appropriate or not]): designs created with the tool are more ‘Pleasant’. Subjectively the participants preferred paper for some of the activities and the tool for others. The results of our comparison show that the tool could be used instead of paper to benefit from some tool-advantages over paper (e.g. digital data gathering and analysis support).

With the goal of helping software engineering researchers understand how to improve their papers, Mary Shaw presented "Writing Good Software Engineering Research Papers" in 2003. Shaw analyzed the abstracts of the papers submitted to the 2002 International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) to determine trends in research question type, contribution type, and validation approach. We revisit Shaw's work to see how the software engineering research community has evolved since 2002. The goal of this paper is to aid software engineering researchers in understanding trends in research question design, research question type, and validation approach by analyzing the abstracts of the papers submitted to ICSE 2016. We implemented Shaw's recommendation for replicating her study through the use of multiple coders and the calculation of inter-rater reliability and demonstrate that her approach can be repeated. Our results indicate that reviewers have increased expectations that papers have solid evaluations of the research contribution. Additionally, the 2016 results include at least 17% mining software repository (MSR) papers, a category of papers not seen in 2002. The advent of MSR papers has increased the use of generalization/characterization research questions, the production of empirical report contribution, and validation by evaluation.

The CAD Contest at ICCAD[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] is a challenging, multi-month R&D competition, focusing on modern and practical problems at the forefront of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). In its sixth year, the 2017 CAD Contest at ICCAD is among the premier worldwide academic programming contests, attracting 122 teams from 10 different regions/countries. This year, three contest problems in the areas of ECO logic synthesis, ECO routing and placement legalization for the advanced nodes are called for competition. We hope that the contest evaluation frameworks and benchmarks boost research on these critical problems and help EDA community discover novel, efficient, high-quality solutions to advance the state-of-the-art in EDA.

Although Moore's law is slowing down, design productivity is still a big issue in semiconductor industry. Drivers are the trend to 3D integration, the addition of design goals such as ultra-low power and safety, and an increasing number of designs in IoT and automotive areas. EDA tools such as high-level synthesis cover a small design area only. Also, the impact of IP reuse is overestimated since IP integration often requires complex configuration and additional software to be developed. To continuously increase design productivity, Infineon heavily relies on an in-house automation framework that utilizes Python as language for automation and synthesis. It supports (and makes use of) classical HDSLs to describe specific design aspects. Mostly structured specification formalisms such as tables, requirements or diagrams (e.g. SysML subsets) are used. These formalisms can be seen as HDSLs with the additional benefit that they exist as a result of a specification process, i.e. need not be coded explicitly. To be able to deal with several formalisms, Infineon's automation framework follows OMG's MDA vision and utilizes meta-models e.g. for generation of infrastructure code. This work focuses on the aspect of combining DSLs, defining a formal semantic for HDSLs and using this definition to validate the correctness of the mapping of HDSLs to HDLs, an essential pillar to connect HDSLs to today's design flows.

Spreadsheet analysis software allows easy data management, as has been shown by the WASP (Write a Scientific Paper) sets of papers in these Best Practice Guidelines (BGP) in the previous issues. However, commonly available spreadsheet software, such as Excel, is weaker on the more advanced statistical techniques. Potential alternatives include the creation of custom macros, the utilisation of an Excel add-in, or using a standard, stand-alone, dedicated statistics package. This does not imply that Excel need be abandoned. Indeed, many users prepare their data in Excel and later transfer it into a statistical package for advanced analysis. Results may then potentially be returned into Excel for graphical depiction. Some examples of such advanced statistical techniques are given in this Best Practice Guideline (BPG) collection. The upcoming non-statistics papers in the WASP BPG series should be found equally useful to researchers who are new to paper writing, such as the one included in this particular set which outlines the writing of a research proposal.

Sensoria is an IST project funded by the EU as Integrated Project (IP) in the 6th Framework Programme (FP6) as part of the Global Computing Initiative (GC). It started on September 2005 and ended on February 2010.

SCADE is a high-level language and environment for developing safety-critical embedded control software. It has been used for more than twenty years in various application domains like avionics, nuclear plants, transportation, and automotive. SCADE was founded on the synchronous data-flow language Lustre invented by Caspi and Halbwachs. In the early years, it was mainly seen as a graphical notation for Lustre but with the unique and key addition of a code generator qualified to the highest standards for safety-critical applications. In 2008, a major revision based on the new language ‘Scade 6’ was released. This language is an original combination of the Lustre data-flow style with control structures borrowed from Esterel and SyncCharts, and compilation and static analyses from Lucid Synchrone for ensuring safety properties. This increase in expressiveness together with the qualified code generator have dramatically widened SCADE scope of applications. While previous publications have described some of its language constructs and compiler algorithms, no reference publication on ‘Scade 6’ exists to date. In this paper, we recall the decisions made in its design, illustrate the main language features and static analyses, and describe the compiler organization developed to satisfy the qualification process.

System Analysis Modeling Language (SAML) is a formal language which helps in expressing and analyzing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the software as well as hardware models. This can be used in model-based safety analysis (MBSA) which provides the means of identifying, localizing and analyzing hazards in these real-time Safety-Critical Systems. This paper describes the work carried out in the organization to validate the complex and critical Mode-Transition Logic (MTL) in Automated Flight Control System (AFCS) being developed in the organization. The Mode-Transition Logic (MTL) of the AFCS system is re-modeled using SAML and further analyzed with model checkers such as PRISM and NuSMV, for generation of counter-examples. The counter examples helped in mapping the safety scenarios along the AFCS requirements. These counter examples also helped in generating the fault model and analyzing the system logic for fault tolerance. Using NUSMV, MTL the failure scenarios were generated and the allowed transitions were studied. Failure management analysis report is generated and mapped as an artefact for the certification. For the illustration of the proposed approach, a suitable framework viz. Verification Environment for Safety-Critical Systems (VECS) is used to validate the utility of Mode-Transition Logic (MTL) in Automated Flight Control System (AFCS). The critical operations and complex functions were analyzed for contingency situations and provide means in significantly enhancing the safe operation of the Safety-Critical System. The mapping of the model safety using this approach will provide compliance with Civil Aerospace Standard DO-178C and DO-331 using Model-Based Design.

Seventeen years after its initial publication at ICSE 2000, the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style continues to hold significance as both a guide for understanding how the World Wide Web is designed to work and an example of how principled design, through the application of architectural styles, can impact the development and understanding of large-scale software architecture. However, REST has also become an industry buzzword: frequently abused to suit a particular argument, confused with the general notion of using HTTP, and denigrated for not being more like a programming methodology or implementation framework. In this paper, we chart the history, evolution, and shortcomings of REST, as well as several related architectural styles that it inspired, from the perspective of a chain of doctoral dissertations produced by the University of California's Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine. These successive theses share a common theme: extending the insights of REST to new domains and, in their own way, exploring the boundary of software engineering as it applies to decentralized software architectures and architectural design. We conclude with discussion of the circumstances, environment, and organizational characteristics that gave rise to this body of work.

Nowadays, due to the frequent technological innovation and market changes, software libraries are evolving very quickly. Backward compatibility has always been one of the most important requirements during the evolution of software platforms and libraries. However, backward compatibility is seldom fully achieved in practice, and many relevant software failures are reported. Therefore, it is important to understand the status, major reasons, and impact of backward incompatibilities in real world software. This paper presents an empirical study to understand behavioral changes of APIs during evolution of software libraries. Specifically, we performed a large-scale cross-version regression testing on 68 consecutive version pairs from 15 popular Java software libraries. Furthermore, we collected and studied 126 real-world software bugs reports on backward incompatibilities of software libraries. Our major findings include: (1) 1,094 test failures / errors and 296 behavioral backward incompatibilities are detected from 52 of 68 consecutive version pairs; (2) there is a distribution mismatch between incompatibilities detected by library-side regression testing, and bug-inducing incompatibilities; (3) the majority of behavioral backward incompatibilities are not well documented in API documents or release notes; and (4) 67% of fixed client bugs caused by backward incompatibilities in software libraries are fixed by client developers, through several simple change patterns made to the backward incompatible API invocation.

Business process modeling is an important concern in enterprise. Formal analysis techniques are crucial to detect semantic issues in the corresponding models, or to help with their refactoring and evolution. However, business process development frameworks often fall short when it comes to go beyond simulation or syntactic checking of the models. In this paper, we present our VBPMN verification framework. It features several techniques for the automatic analysis of business processes modeled using BPMN, the de facto standard for business process modeling. As such, it supports a more robust development of business processes.

This paper introduces a novel approach for flexible workflow management by applying constraint satisfaction problem solving. This enables us to support workflow deviations at runtime, react to upcoming events or unpredictable circumstances, but still support the user through worklist suggestions. The developed workflow engine is completely based on declarative workflow representations, whereas procedural languages are used for workflow modeling. The described approach is fully implemented and our experiments demonstrate sufficient runtime performance for practical use.

The current state of the art in projection mapping can produce impressive results, but the workflow processes is quite primitive and complex. The goal was to set out to create a new workflow that is entirely constructed in a 3D environment, to make the 3D projection mapping experience more powerful, flexible, and easier to execute.

A quantitative analysis supports the argument that very low acceptance rates of conference papers are more likely to impede publication of bold and innovative research results than to indicate the chosen papers' prestige and elite status.

When writing a program generator requires considerable intellectual effort,it is pleasant to amortize that effort by using the generator to build more than one application. When a program generator serves multiple clients,however, the implementor must address pragmatic questions that implementors of single-use program generators can ignore. In how many languages should generated code be written? How should code be packaged? What should the interfaces to the client code look like? How should a user control variations? This paper uses exam- ples from SLED, λ-RTL, and ASDL to elaborate on these questions. It is hoped that the paper will stimulate discussion and the development of better techniques. Most urgently needed is a simple, clear way to control interfaces to generated code.

Conference papers are a major source of information in postgraduate education and research. However, the quality of many practitioner-written conference papers describing their experiences is less than optimal. This paper suggests a template to try to improve the quality of practitioner presentations and papers in the Case Study genre (prototyped at SETE 2004) to format practitioner papers as a way to link their experiences into the literature to provide data to assist researchers improving the practice of systems engineering. Examples of the use of the template are included.

International audience; When developing and maintaining distributed systems, auditing privacy properties gains more and more relevance. Nevertheless, this task is lacking support of automated tools and, hence, is mostly carried out manually. We present a formal approach which enables auditors to model the flow of critical data in order to shed new light on a system and to automatically verify given privacy constraints. The formalization is incorporated into a larger policy analysis and verification framework and overall soundness is proven with Isabelle/HOL. Using this solution, it becomes possible to automatically compute architectures which follow specified privacy conditions or to input an existing architecture for verification. Our tool is evaluated in two real-world case studies, where we uncover and fix previously unknown violations of privacy.

In this demonstration paper, we describe an open source workflow for supporting experiments in semantic publishing research. Based on a flexible, component-based approach, natural language papers can be converted into a Linked Open Data (LOD) compliant knowledge base. We exemplary discuss how to plan and execute experiments based on an integrated suite of tools, thereby both significantly lowering the barrier of entry in this field, while also encouraging the exchange of tools when building novel contributions.

Since our work on verification sixteen years ago, our views of the role of verification, and the centrality of correctness, have evolved. In our presentation, we’ll talk about some of our concerns about the limitations of this kind of technology, including: usability as a key factor; the unknowable properties of the environment; and the inadequacy of specifications as a means of capturing users’ desires. We’ll describe two approaches we’re currently working on to mitigate these concerns — (1) moving to higher level abstractions with correctness by construction and (2) focusing on the conceptual structure of applications — and will argue that, combined with traditional verification tools, these offer the possibility of applications that are both usable and correct.

Process and workflow technology have traditionally not allowed for the specification of, nor run-time enforcement of, real-time requirements, despite the fact that time-to-market and other real-time constraints are more stringent than ever. Without specification of timing constraints, process designers cannot effectively reason about real-time constraints on process programs and the efficacy of their process programs in satisfying those constraints. Furthermore, without executable semantics for those timing specifications, such reasoning might not be applicable to the process as actually executed. We seek to support reasoning about the real-time requirements of software processes. In this paper, we describe work in which we have added real-time specifications to a process programming language, and in which we have added deadline timers and task scheduling to enforce the real-time requirements of processes.