ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Testing with simulation environments helps to identify critical failing scenarios for self-driving cars (SDCs). Simulation-based tests are safer than in-field operational tests and allow detecting software defects before deployment. However, these tests ...

Refinement of formal system models towards implementation has been a mainstay of system development since the inception of formal and Correct by Construction approaches to system development. However, pure refinement approaches do not always deal fluently ...

Software comments sometimes are not promptly updated in sync when the associated code is changed. The inconsistency between code and comments may mislead the developers and result in future bugs. Thus, studies concerning code-comment synchronization have ...

There are numerous domains in which information systems need to deal with uncertain information. These uncertainties may originate from different reasons such as vagueness, imprecision, incompleteness, or inconsistencies, and in many cases, they cannot be ...

Links between pull request and the issues they address document and accelerate the development of a software project but are often omitted. We present a new tool, Aide-mémoire, to suggest such links when a developer submits a pull request or closes an ...

Much research on software engineering relies on experimental studies based on fault injection. Fault injection, however, is not often relevant to emulate real-world software faults since it “blindly” injects large numbers of faults. It remains indeed ...

With the rapid increase of public code repositories, developers maintain a great desire to retrieve precise code snippets by using natural language. Despite existing deep learning-based approaches that provide end-to-end solutions (i.e., accept natural ...

Pull requests are a key part of the collaborative software development and code review process today. However, pull requests can also slow down the software development process when the reviewer(s) or the author do not actively engage with the pull ...

Debugging is known to be a notoriously painstaking and time-consuming task. As one major family of automated debugging, statistical debugging approaches have been well investigated over the past decade, which collect failing and passing executions and ...

Estimating worst-case execution time (WCET) is an important activity at early design stages of real-time systems. Based on WCET estimates, engineers make design and implementation decisions to ensure that task executions always complete before their ...

Software bloat is code that is packaged in an application but is actually not necessary to run the application. The presence of software bloat is an issue for security, performance, and for maintenance. In this article, we introduce a novel technique for ...

The decompiler is one of the most common tools for examining executable binaries without the corresponding source code. It transforms binaries into high-level code, reversing the compilation process. Unfortunately, decompiler output is far from readable ...

In collaborative software development, programmers create software branches to add features and fix bugs tentatively, and then merge branches to integrate edits. When edits from different branches textually overlap (i.e., textual conflicts) or lead to ...

Implementing bug-free concurrent programs is a challenging task in modern software development. State-of-the-art static analyses find hundreds of concurrency bugs in production code, scaling to large codebases. Yet, fixing these bugs in constantly ...

The rapid adoption of Deep Learning (DL) systems in safety critical domains such as medical imaging and autonomous driving urgently calls for ways to test their correctness and robustness. Borrowing from the concept of test adequacy in traditional ...

Programming language documentation refers to the set of technical documents that provide application developers with a description of the high-level concepts of a language (e.g., manuals, tutorials, and API references). Such documentation is essential to ...

High-quality source code comments are valuable for software development and maintenance, however, code often contains low-quality comments or lacks them altogether. We name such source code comments as suboptimal comments. Such suboptimal comments create ...