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22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014),
November 16–21, 2014,
Hong Kong, China
Visions and Challenges
Thu, Nov 20, 09:00 - 10:20, Auditorium
Methodology and Culture: Drivers of Mediocrity in Software Engineering?
Marian Petre and Daniela Damian
(Open University, UK; University of Victoria, Canada)
Methodology implementation failure is attributed to developer mediocrity (by management) – not to organizational mediocrity (rigidity or control-driven, process-driven management), or to a lack of adaptation capability in the methodology. In supporting software construction as a creative process, however, we must promote excellence rather than conformity. We argue that we – through principled research -- must pay attention to the interplay between methodology and culture – the local adaptations needed to make things work, understand how the two co-evolve and how they may contribute together to software quality.
@InProceedings{FSE14p829,
author = {Marian Petre and Daniela Damian},
title = {Methodology and Culture: Drivers of Mediocrity in Software Engineering?},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {829--832},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty
Sebastian Elbaum and
David S. Rosenblum
(University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA; National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Uncertainty is becoming more prevalent in the software systems we build, introducing challenges in the way we develop software, especially in software testing. In this work we explore how uncertainty affects software testing, how it is managed currently, and how it could be treated more effectively.
@InProceedings{FSE14p833,
author = {Sebastian Elbaum and David S. Rosenblum},
title = {Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {833--836},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
Speculative Reprogramming
Marc Palyart,
Gail C. Murphy,
Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Xavier Blanc
(University of British Columbia, Canada; North Carolina State University, USA; University of Bordeaux, France)
Although software development involves making numerous decisions amongst alternatives, the design and implementation choices made typically become invisible; what a developer sees in the project's artifacts are the end result of all of the decisions. What if, instead, all of the choices made were tracked and it was easy for a developer to revisit a point where a decision was made and choose another alternative? What if the development environment could detect and suggest alternative choices? What if it was easy and low-cost to try another path? We explore the idea of speculative reprogramming that could support a what-if environment for the programming stages of software development.
@InProceedings{FSE14p837,
author = {Marc Palyart and Gail C. Murphy and Emerson Murphy-Hill and Xavier Blanc},
title = {Speculative Reprogramming},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {837--840},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
A Variability Perspective of Mutation Analysis
Xavier Devroey, Gilles Perrouin, Maxime Cordy, Mike Papadakis
, Axel Legay, and Pierre-Yves Schobbens
(University of Namur, Belgium; University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg; INRIA, France)
Mutation testing is an effective technique for either improving or generating fault-finding test suites. It creates defective or incorrect program artifacts of the program under test and evaluates the ability of test suites to reveal them. Despite being effective, mutation is costly since it requires assessing the test cases with a large number of defective artifacts. Even worse, some of these artifacts are behaviourally ``equivalent'' to the original one and hence, they unnecessarily increase the testing effort. We adopt a variability perspective on mutation analysis. We model a defective artifact as a transition system with a specific feature selected and consider it as a member of a mutant family. The mutant family is encoded as a Featured Transition System, a compact formalism initially dedicated to model-checking of software product lines. We show how to evaluate a test suite against the set of all candidate defects by using mutant families. We can evaluate all the considered defects at the same time and isolate some equivalent mutants. We can also assist the test generation process and efficiently consider higher-order mutants.
@InProceedings{FSE14p841,
author = {Xavier Devroey and Gilles Perrouin and Maxime Cordy and Mike Papadakis and Axel Legay and Pierre-Yves Schobbens},
title = {A Variability Perspective of Mutation Analysis},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {841--844},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
Mining Micro-practices from Operational Data
Minghui Zhou
and Audris Mockus
(Peking University, China; University of Tennessee, USA; Avaya Labs, USA)
Micro-practices are actual (and usually undocumented or incorrectly documented) activity patterns used by individuals or projects to accomplish basic software development tasks, such as writing code, testing, triaging bugs, or mentoring newcomers. The operational data in software repositories presents the tantalizing possibility to discover such fine-scale behaviors and use them to understand and improve software development. We propose a large-scale evidence-based approach to accomplish this by first creating a mirror of the projects in the open source universe. The next step would involve the inductive generalization from in-depth studies of specific projects from one side and the categorization of micro-practices in the entire universe from the other side.
@InProceedings{FSE14p845,
author = {Minghui Zhou and Audris Mockus},
title = {Mining Micro-practices from Operational Data},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {845--848},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
Achieving Lightweight Trustworthy Traceability
Jane Cleland-Huang, Mona Rahimi, and Patrick Mäder
(DePaul University, USA; TU Ilmenau, Germany)
Despite the fact that traceability is a required element of almost all safety-critical software development processes, the trace data is often incomplete, inaccurate, redundant, conflicting, and outdated. As a result, it is neither trusted nor trustworthy. In this vision paper we propose a philosophical change in the traceability landscape which transforms traceability from a heavy-weight process producing untrusted trace links, to a light-weight results-oriented trustworthy solution. Current traceability practices which retard agility are cast away and replaced with a disciplined, just-in-time approach. The novelty of our solution lies in a clear separation of trusted trace links from untrusted ones, the change in perspective from `living-with' inacurate traces toward rigorous and ongoing debridement of stale links from the trusted pool, and the notion of synthesizing available `project exhaust' as evidence to systematically construct or reconstruct purposed, highly-focused trace links.
@InProceedings{FSE14p849,
author = {Jane Cleland-Huang and Mona Rahimi and Patrick Mäder},
title = {Achieving Lightweight Trustworthy Traceability},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {849--852},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
Software Maintenance like Maintenance in Other Engineering Disciplines
Gustavo Villavicencio
(Universidad Católica de Santiago del Estero, Argentina)
Abstract: Software maintenance exhibits many differences regarding how other engineering disciplines carry out maintenance on their artifacts. Such dissimilarity is caused due to the fact that it is easy to get a copy from the original artifact to be used in maintenance, and also because the flat dimension of the software text facilitates access to the components by simply using a text editor. Other engineering disciplines resort to different artifact versions (obtained by dissassembling) where the introduction of modifications (previous comprehension) is easier. After which the artifact is reassembled. In software engineering this approach can be simulated by combining program transformation techniques, search-based software engineering technology and design attributes.
@InProceedings{FSE14p853,
author = {Gustavo Villavicencio},
title = {Software Maintenance like Maintenance in Other Engineering Disciplines},
booktitle = {Proc.\ FSE},
publisher = {ACM},
pages = {853--856},
doi = {},
year = {2014},
}
proc time: 1.15