As a framework evolves, changes in its Application Programming Interface (API) can break client programs that extend the framework. Repairing a client program can be a challenging task because developers need to understand the context surrounding the ...

Architecture evolution is a key feature of most software systems. There are few tools that help architects plan and execute these evolutionary paths. We demonstrate a tool to enable architects to describe evolution paths, associate properties with ...

Research in the fields of software quality and maintainability requires the analysis of large quantities of data, which often originate from open source software projects. Pre-processing data, calculating metrics, and synthesizing composite results from ...

Before performing drastic changes to a project, it is worthwhile to thoroughly explore the available options within the current structure of a project. An alternative to drastic change are internal changes that adjust current options within a software ...

We present the results of a three year field study of the software development process choices made by project teams at two leading offshore vendors. In particular, we focus on the performance implications of project teams that chose to augment ...

Since manual black-box testing of GUI-based APplications (GAPs) is tedious and laborious, test engineers create test scripts to automate the testing process. These test scripts interact with GAPs by performing actions on their GUI objects. An extra ...

Every bug has a story behind it. The people that discover and resolve it need to coordinate, to get information from documents, tools, or other people, and to navigate through issues of accountability, ownership, and organizational structure. This paper ...

Much of what we know about how programmers refactor in the wild is based on studies that examine just a few software projects. Researchers have rarely taken the time to replicate these studies in other contexts or to examine the assumptions on which ...

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has become an important development framework for many large-scale software. Previous research has reported that as in traditional code-based development, cloning also occurs in MDE. However, there has been little work on ...

Goal-oriented methods have increasingly been recognised as an effective means for eliciting, elaborating, analysing and specifying software requirements. A key activity in these approaches is the elaboration of a correct and complete set of opertional ...

Features express the variabilities and commonalities among programs in a software product line (SPL). A feature model defines the valid combinations of features, where each combination corresponds to a program in an SPL. SPLs and their feature models ...

As software systems continue to grow and evolve, locating code for maintenance and reuse tasks becomes increasingly difficult. Existing static code search techniques using natural language queries provide little support to help developers determine ...

We present a technique for finding security vulnerabilities in Web applications. SQL Injection (SQLI) and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are widespread forms of attack in which the attacker crafts the input to the application to access or modify ...

In this paper we address the problem of combining software components with different and possibly incompatible legal licenses to create a software application that does not violate any of these licenses while potentially having its own. We call this ...

Models can help software engineers to reason about design-time decisions before implementing a system. This paper focuses on models that deal with non-functional properties, such as reliability and performance. To build such models, one must rely on ...

Automated systems for measurement and analysis are not adopted on a large scale in companies, despite the opportunities they offer. The fear of the “Big Brother” and the lack of reports giving insights into the real adoption process and concrete usages ...

Code ownership transfer or succession is a crucial ingredient in open source code reuse and in offshoring projects. Measuring succession can help understand factors that affect the success of such transfers and suggest ways to make them more efficient. ...

Software developers have long known that project success requires a robust understanding of both technical and social linkages. However, research has largely considered these independently. Research on networks of technical artifacts focuses on ...

Empirical research on collaborative software development practices indicates that technical and social aspects of software development are often intertwined. The processes followed are tacit and constantly evolving, thus not all of them are amenable to ...