| 1. |
- Costa, D., et al.
(författare)
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What's Wrong with My Benchmark Results? Studying Bad Practices in JMH Benchmarks
- 2021
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Ingår i: Ieee Transactions on Software Engineering. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520 .- 2326-3881. ; 47:7, s. 1452-1467
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Microbenchmarking frameworks, such as Java's Microbenchmark Harness (JMH), allow developers to write fine-grained performance test suites at the method or statement level. However, due to the complexities of the Java Virtual Machine, developers often struggle with writing expressive JMH benchmarks which accurately represent the performance of such methods or statements. In this paper, we empirically study bad practices of JMH benchmarks. We present a tool that leverages static analysis to identify 5 bad JMH practices. Our empirical study of 123 open source Java-based systems shows that each of these 5 bad practices are prevalent in open source software. Further, we conduct several experiments to quantify the impact of each bad practice in multiple case studies, and find that bad practices often significantly impact the benchmark results. To validate our experimental results, we constructed seven patches that fix the identified bad practices for six of the studied open source projects, of which six were merged into the main branch of the project. In this paper, we show that developers struggle with accurate Java microbenchmarking, and provide several recommendations to developers of microbenchmarking frameworks on how to improve future versions of their framework.
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| 2. |
- Menghi, C., et al.
(författare)
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Specification Patterns for Robotic Missions
- 2021
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Ingår i: Ieee Transactions on Software Engineering. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520 .- 2326-3881. ; 47:10, s. 2208-2224
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Mobile and general-purpose robots increasingly support everyday life, requiring dependable robotics control software. Creating such software mainly amounts to implementing complex behaviors known as missions. Recognizing this need, a large number of domain-specific specification languages has been proposed. These, in addition to traditional logical languages, allow the use of formally specified missions for synthesis, verification, simulation or guiding implementation. For instance, the logical language LTL is commonly used by experts to specify missions as an input for planners, which synthesize a robot's required behavior. Unfortunately, domain-specific languages are usually tied to specific robot models, while logical languages such as LTL are difficult to use by non-experts. We present a catalog of 22 mission specification patterns for mobile robots, together with tooling for instantiating, composing, and compiling the patterns to create mission specifications. The patterns provide solutions for recurrent specification problems; each pattern details the usage intent, known uses, relationships to other patterns, and-most importantly-a template mission specification in temporal logic. Our tooling produces specifications expressed in the temporal logics LTL and CTL to be used by planners, simulators or model checkers. The patterns originate from 245 mission requirements extracted from the robotics literature, and they are evaluated upon a total of 441 real-world mission requirements and 1251 mission specifications. Five of these reflect scenarios defined with two well-known industrial partners developing human-size robots. We further validate our patterns' correctness with simulators and two different types of real robots.
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| 3. |
- Passos, L., et al.
(författare)
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A Study of Feature Scattering in the Linux Kernel
- 2021
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520 .- 2326-3881. ; 47:1, s. 146-164
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Feature code is often scattered across a software system. Scattering is not necessarily bad if used with care, as witnessed by systems with highly scattered features that evolved successfully. Feature scattering, often realized with a pre-processor, circumvents limitations of programming languages and software architectures. Unfortunately, little is known about the principles governing scattering in large and long-living software systems. We present a longitudinal study of feature scattering in the Linux kernel, complemented by a survey with 74, and interviews with nine Linux kernel developers. We analyzed almost eight years of the kernel's history, focusing on its largest subsystem: device drivers. We learned that the ratio of scattered features remained nearly constant and that most features were introduced without scattering. Yet, scattering easily crosses subsystem boundaries, and highly scattered outliers exist. Scattering often addresses a performance-maintenance tradeoff (alleviating complicated APIs), hardware design limitations, and avoids code duplication. While developers do not consciously enforce scattering limits, they actually improve the system design and refactor code, thereby mitigating pre-processor idiosyncrasies or reducing its use.
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| 4. |
- Sabir, Fatima, et al.
(författare)
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A Mixed-Method Approach to Recommend Corrections and Correct REST Antipatterns
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : IEEE. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520 .- 2326-3881. ; 48:11, s. 4319-4338
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many companies, e.g., Facebook and YouTube, use the REST architecture and provide REST APIs to their clients. Like any other software systems, REST APIs need maintenance and must evolve to improve and stay relevant. Antipatterns—poor design practices—hinder this maintenance and evolution. Although the literature defines many antipatterns and proposes approaches for their (automatic) detection, their correction did not receive much attention. Therefore, we apply a mixed-method approach to study REST APIs and REST antipatterns with the objectives to recommend corrections or, when possible, actually correct the REST antipatterns. Qualitatively, via case studies, we analyse the evolution of 11 REST APIs, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, over six years. We detect occurrences of eight REST antipatterns in the years 2014, 2017, and 2020 in 17 versions of 11 REST APIs. Thus, we show that (1) REST APIs and antipatterns evolve over time and (2) developers seem to remove antipatterns. Qualitatively via a discourse analysis, we analyse developers’ forums and report that developers are concerned with the occurrences of REST antipatterns and discuss corrections to these antipatterns. Following these qualitative studies, using an engineering-research approach, we propose the following novel and unique contributions: (1) we describe and compare the corrections of eight REST antipatterns from the academic literature and from developers’ forums; (2) we devise and describe algorithms to recommend corrections to some of these antipatterns; (3) we present algorithms and a tool to correct some of these antipatterns by intercepting and modifying responses from REST APIs; and, (4) we validate the recommendations and the corrections manually and via a survey answered by 24 REST developers. Thus, we propose to REST API developers and researchers the first, grounded approach to correct REST antipatterns.
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| 5. |
- Zhang, Xinhai, et al.
(författare)
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Finding Critical Scenarios for Automated Driving Systems: A Systematic Mapping Study
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520 .- 2326-3881. ; , s. 1-1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Scenario-based approaches have been receiving a huge amount of attention in research and engineering of automated driving systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the driving environment, and the complexity of the driving task itself, the number of possible driving scenarios that an Automated Driving System or Advanced Driving-Assistance System may encounter is virtually infinite. Therefore it is essential to be able to reason about the identification of scenarios and in particular critical ones that may impose unacceptable risk if not considered. Critical scenarios are particularly important to support design, verification and validation efforts, and as a basis for a safety case. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic mapping study in the context of autonomous driving. The main contributions are: (i) introducing a comprehensive taxonomy for critical scenario identification methods; (ii) giving an overview of the state-of-the-art research based on the taxonomy encompassing 86 papers between 2017 and 2020; and (iii) identifying open issues and directions for further research. The provided taxonomy comprises three main perspectives encompassing the problem definition (the why), the solution (the methods to derive scenarios), and the assessment of the established scenarios. In addition, we discuss open research issues considering the perspectives of coverage, practicability, and scenario space explosion.
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| 6. |
- Alsarhan, Qusay, et al.
(författare)
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Software module clustering : an in-depth literature analysis
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : IEEE. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 48:6, s. 1905-1928
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Software module clustering is an unsupervised learning method used to cluster software entities (e.g., classes, modules, or files) of similar features. The obtained clusters may be used to study, analyze, and understand the structure and behavior of the software entities. Implementing software module clustering with optimal results is challenging. Accordingly, researchers have addressed many aspects of software module clustering in the last decade. Thus, it is essential to present research evidence that has been published in this area. In this study, 143 research papers that examined software module clustering from well-known literature databases were extensively reviewed to extract useful data. The obtained data were then used to answer several research questions regarding state-of-the-art clustering approaches, applications of clustering in software engineering, clustering process, clustering algorithms, and evaluation methods. Several research gaps and challenges in software module clustering are discussed in this paper to provide a useful reference for researchers in this field.
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| 7. |
- Babikian, Aren A., et al.
(författare)
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Concretization of Abstract Traffic Scene Specifications Using Metaheuristic Search
- 2024
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : IEEE COMPUTER SOC. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 50:1, s. 48-68
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Existing safety assurance approaches for autonomous vehicles (AVs) perform system-level safety evaluation by placing the AV-under-test in challenging traffic scenarios captured by abstract scenario specifications and investigated in realistic traffic simulators. As a first step towards scenario-based testing of AVs, the initial scene of a traffic scenario must be concretized. In this context, the scene concretization challenge takes as input a high-level specification of abstract traffic scenes and aims to map them to concrete scenes where exact numeric initial values are defined for each attribute of a vehicle (e.g. position or velocity). In this paper, we propose a traffic scene concretization approach that places vehicles on realistic road maps such that they satisfy an extensible set of abstract constraints defined by an expressive scene specification language which also supports static detection of inconsistencies. Then, abstract constraints are mapped to corresponding numeric constraints, which are solved by metaheuristic search with customizable objective functions and constraint aggregation strategies. We conduct a series of experiments over three realistic road maps to compare eight configurations of our approach with three variations of the state-of-the-art Scenic tool, and to evaluate its scalability.
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| 8. |
- Bagheri, Maryam, et al.
(författare)
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Magnifier : A Compositional Analysis Approach for Autonomous Traffic Control
- 2022
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 48:8, s. 2732-2747
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Autonomous traffic control systems are large-scale systems with critical goals. To satisfy expected properties, these systems adapt themselves to possible changes in their environment and in the system itself. The adaptation may result in further changes propagated throughout the system. For each change and its consequent adaptation, assuring the satisfaction of properties of the system at runtime is important. A prominent approach to assure the correct behavior of these systems is verification at runtime, which has strict time and memory limitations. To tackle these limitations, we propose Magnifier, an iterative, incremental, and compositional verification approach that operates on an actor-based model where actors are grouped in components, and components are augmented with a coordinator. The Magnifier idea is zooming on the area (component) affected by a change and verifying the correctness of properties of interest of the system after adapting the component to the change. Magnifier checks if the change is propagating, and if that is the case, then it zooms out to perform adaptation on a larger area to contain the change. The process is iterative and incremental, and considers areas affected by the change one by one. In Magnifier, we use the Coordinated Adaptive Actor model (CoodAA) for traffic control systems. We present a formal semantics for CoodAA as a network of Timed Input-Output Automata (TIOAs), and prove the correctness of our compositional reasoning. We implement our approach in Ptolemy II. The results of our experiments indicate that the proposed approach improves the verification time and the memory consumption compared to the non-compositional approach.
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| 9. |
- Berntsson Svensson, Richard, et al.
(författare)
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Quality Requirements in Industrial Practice – An Extended Interview Study at Eleven Companies
- 2012
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - : IEEE. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520. ; 38:4, s. 923-935
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In order to create a successful software product and assure its quality, it is not enough to fulfill the functional requirements, it is also crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements (QR). An extended, previosluy piloted, interview study was performed to identify specific challenges associated with the selection, trade-off, and management of QR in industrial practice. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with eleven product managers and eleven project leaders from eleven software companies. The contribution of this study is fourfold: First, it compares how QR are handled in two cases, companies working in business-to-business markets, and companies that are working in business-to-consumer markets. These two are also compared in terms of impact on the handling of QRs. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of QR by product and project management respectively. Third, it includes an examination of the interdependencies among quality requirements perceived as most important by the practitioners. Fourth, it characterizes the selection and management of QR in down-stream development activities.
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| 10. |
- Berntsson Svensson, Richard, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Quality Requirements in Industrial Practice - An Extended Interview Study at Eleven Companies
- 2011
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Ingår i: IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. - 0098-5589 .- 1939-3520.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In order to create a successful software product and assure its quality, it is not enough to fulfill the functional requirements, it is also crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements (QR). An extended, previously piloted, interview study was performed to identify specific challenges associated with the selection, trade-off, and management of QR in industrial practice. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with eleven product managers and eleven project leaders from eleven software companies. The contribution of this study is fourfold: First, it compares how QR are handled in two cases, companies working in business-to-business markets, and companies that are working in business-to-consumer markets. These two are also compared in terms of impact on the handling of QRs. Second, it compares the perceptions and priorities of QR by product and project management respectively. Third, it includes an examination of the interdependencies among quality requirements perceived as most important by the practitioners. Fourth, it characterizes the selection and management of QR in down-stream development activities.
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