Bugs are inevitable in software development and maintenance processes. Recently a lot of research efforts have been devoted to automatic program repair, aiming to reduce the efforts of debugging. ...However, since it is difficult to ensure that the generated patches meet all quality requirements such as correctness, developers still need to review the patch. In addition, current techniques produce only patches without explanation, making it difficult for the developers to understand the patch. Therefore, we believe a more desirable approach should generate not only the patch but also an explanation of the patch. To generate a patch explanation, it is important to first understand how patches were explained. In this paper, we explored how developers explain their patches by manually analyzing 300 merged bug-fixing pull requests from six projects on GitHub. Our contribution is twofold. First, we build a patch explanation model, which summarizes the elements in a patch explanation, and corresponding expressive forms. Second, we conducted a quantitative analysis to understand the distributions of elements, and the correlation between elements and their expressive forms.
ActionsRemaker: Reproducing GitHub Actions Zhu, Hao-Nan; Guan, Kevin Z.; Furth, Robert M. ...
2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion),
05/2023
Conference Proceeding
Mining Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has enabled new research opportunities for the software engineering (SE) research community. However, it remains a challenge to reproduce ...CI/CD build processes, which is crucial for several areas of research within SE such as fault localization and repair. In this paper, we present ActionsRemaker, a reproducer for GitHub Actions builds. We describe the challenges on reproducing GitHub Actions builds and the design of ActionsRemaker. Evaluation of ActionsRemaker demonstrates its ability to reproduce fail-pass pairs: of 180 pairs from 67 repositories, 130 (72.2%) from 43 repositories are reproducible. We also discuss reasons for unreproducibility. ActionsRemaker is publicly available at https://github.com/bugswarm/actions-remaker, and a demo of the tool can be found at https://youtu.be/flblSqoxeAk.
Software companies need to employ state-of-the-art technologies to meet customer requirements. Owing to the complexity of contemporary software products and uncertainty concerning the budget for the ...required resources, companies use process-oriented quality management techniques in order to guarantee appropriate product quality. In this light, standardised quality assurance system that uses the capability maturity model integration-development (CMMI-DEV) program are incorporated into software development processes, and software companies aim to enhance productivity by acquiring CMMI-DEV certificates. In this study, an approach based on CMMI-DEV is used to develop software process diversity for an international company. The results show that the proposed software process diversity model can be used to assess and improve processes in middle-sized software companies that have identical technical frameworks and similar business structures.
Rotten green tests are passing tests which have at least one assertion that is not executed. They give developers a false sense of trust in the code. In this paper, we present RTj, a framework that ...analyzes test cases from Java projects with the goal of detecting and refactoring rotten test cases. RTj automatically discovered 418 rotten tests from 26 open-source Java projects hosted on GitHub. Using RTj, developers have an automated recommendation of the tests that need to be modified for improving the quality of the applications under test. A video is available at: https://youtu.be/Uqxf-Wzp3Mg
Developers frequently add annotations to source code to help them remember pertinent information and mark locations of interest for future investigation. Finding and refinding these notes is a form ...of navigation that is integral to software maintenance. Although there is some tool support in modern development environments for authoring and navigating these comments, we have observed that these annotations often fail to remind and are sometimes difficult to find by the programmer. To address these shortcomings, we have designed a new approach for software navigation called tags for software engineering activities (TagSEA). TagSEA combines the notion of waypointing (a mechanism for marking locations in spatial navigation) with social tagging to support programmers in defining semantically rich annotations to source code comments. The tool provides support for creating, editing, navigating, and managing these annotations. We present the results from two empirical studies, where we observed and then analyzed how professional programmers used source code annotations to support their development activities over 24 months. Our findings indicate that the addition of semantic information to annotations can improve their value. We also provide suggestions on how annotation tools in general may be improved.
This article presents practical experiences and lessons learned in defining and implementing an agile model-driven development process using the MDD tools chain. This process and its implementation ...inherit the merits of scrum, extreme programming, and the Unified Software Development Processes. The experience data demonstrates that combining MDD practices with agile development process can significantly reduce software development cycle time and increase productivity and quality.
To manage the complexity of developing, maintaining, and evolving a critical software-intensive system, its architecture description must be accurately and traceably linked to its implementation.
In recent years, an increasing interest has been observed in the development and use of simulations, serious games (SGs) and gamification strategies to teach software project management (SPM) in a ...highly practical way. The current SGs for SPM have a quite specific scope, are not able to provide and dynamically change game scenarios during the life of the SG and do not allow teachers to assess students' new skills automatically. These weaknesses led to the development of ProDec, a simulation-based SG that is able to incorporate SPM real-life practice. In this study, the authors discuss the use of SGs in SPM education before they describe ProDecAdmin, the game scenario design tool for ProDec. ProDecAdmin provides teachers with an environment for designing the game scenarios for ProDec. Additionally, it helps teachers establish the assessment criteria to automate the students' assessment during the game plays. These functionalities allow ProDec to offer students any game scenario that teachers design and to assess their performance in them. Hence, the tool ProDecAdmin helps the SG ProDec to overcome the lack of flexibility and automatic assessment identified in the current SGs for SPM. This study also outlines the results of the usability evaluation conducted.
Model-driven and component-oriented development is increasingly being used in the development of embedded systems. When combined, both paradigms provide several advantages, such as higher reuse ...rates, and improved system quality. Performing model-driven and component-oriented development should be accompanied by a component model and a method that prescribes how the component model is used. This article provides an overview on the MARMOT method, which consists of an abstract component model and a methodology for the development of embedded systems. The paper describes a feasibility study that demonstrates MARMOT's capability to alleviate system design, verification, implementation, and reuse. Results indicate that model-driven and component-based development following the MARMOT method outperforms Agile development for embedded systems, leads to maintainable systems, and higher than normal reuse rates.
In this paper, we present Sosed, a tool for discovering similar software projects. We use fastText to compute the embeddings of subtokens into a dense space for 120,000 GitHub projects in 200 ...languages. Then, we cluster embeddings to identify groups of semantically similar subtokens that reflect topics in source code. We use a dataset of 9 million GitHub projects as a reference search base. To identify similar projects, we compare the distributions of clusters among their subtokens. The tool receives an arbitrary project as input, extracts subtokens in 16 most popular programming languages, computes cluster distribution, and finds projects with the closest distribution in the search base. We labeled subtoken clusters with short descriptions to enable Sosed to produce interpretable output.
Sosed is available at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/sosed/. The tool demo is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYLkztCGRt8. The multi-language extractor of subtokens is available separately at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/buckwheat/.
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