ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

A Dockerfile defines a set of instructions to build Docker images, which can then be instantiated to support containerized applications. Recent studies have revealed a considerable amount of quality issues with Dockerfiles. In this article, we propose a ...

Partial code usually involves non-fully-qualified type names (non-FQNs) and undeclared receiving objects. Resolving the FQNs of these non-FQN types and undeclared receiving objects (referred to as type inference) is the prerequisite to effective search ...

Weakly hard real-time systems can, to some degree, tolerate deadline misses, but their schedulability still needs to be analyzed to ensure their quality of service. Such analysis usually occurs at early design stages to provide implementation guidelines ...

Agile development methods have become a standard in the software industry, including in large-scale projects. These methods share a set of underlying assumptions that distinguish them from more traditional plan-driven approaches. In this article, we adopt ...

Rust is an emerging programming language designed for the development of systems software. To facilitate the reuse of Rust code, crates.io, as a central package registry of the Rust ecosystem, hosts thousands of third-party Rust packages. The openness of ...

Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs) are often safety-critical and deployed in uncertain environments. Identifying scenarios where CPSs do not comply with requirements is fundamental but difficult due to the multidisciplinary nature of CPSs. We investigate the ...

Pull Requests (PRs) that are neither progressed nor resolved clutter the list of PRs, making it difficult for the maintainers to manage and prioritize unresolved PRs. To automatically track, follow up, and close such inactive PRs, Stale bot was introduced ...

WebAssembly (abbreviated WASM) has emerged as a promising language of the Web and also been used for a wide spectrum of software applications such as mobile applications and desktop applications. These applications, named WASM applications, commonly run ...

Developers insert logging statements in the source code to collect important runtime information about software systems. The textual descriptions in logging statements (i.e., logging texts) are printed during system executions and exposed to multiple ...

Creating accessible software is imperative for making software inclusive for all users.Unfortunately, the topic of accessibility is frequently excluded from computing education, leading to scenarios where students are unaware of either how to develop ...

Search-based software testing (SBST) typically relies on fitness functions to guide the search exploration toward software failures. There are two main techniques to define fitness functions: (a) automated fitness function computation from the ...

Fault localization, aiming at localizing the root cause of the bug under repair, has been a longstanding research topic. Although many approaches have been proposed in past decades, most of the existing studies work at coarse-grained statement or method ...

With its growing use in safety/security-critical applications, Deep Learning (DL) has raised increasing concerns regarding its dependability. In particular, DL has a notorious problem of lacking robustness. Input added with adversarial perturbations, i.e.,...

Memory-related vulnerabilities can result in performance degradation or even program crashes, constituting severe threats to the security of modern software. Despite the promising results of deep learning (DL)-based vulnerability detectors, there exist ...

To date, the users of test-driven program repair tools suffer from the overfitting problem; a generated patch may pass all available tests without being correct. In the existing work, users are treated as merely passive consumers of the tests. However, ...

Cryptography is a core component of many security applications, and flaws hidden in its implementation will affect the functional integrity or, more severely, pose threats to data security. Hence, guaranteeing the correctness of the implementation is ...

A Software Product Line (SPL) is a set of software products that are built from a variability model. Real-world SPLs typically involve a vast number of valid products, making it impossible to individually test each of them. This arises the need for ...

With the increasing interconnection of smart devices, users often desire to adopt the same app on quite different devices for identical tasks, such as watching the same movies on both their smartphones and TVs. However, the significant differences in ...