The Java Modeling Language (JML) is widely used in academic research as a common language for formal methods tools that work with Java. JML is a design by contract language that can be used to specify detailed designs of Java programs, frameworks, and ...

In Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), feature modelling is frequently used to model commonalities and variabilities within a domain. A feature model captures an abstract view of a product line and it can serve as a starting point for software ...

Although self-adaptivity is emerging as an important system property, designers still lack principled and systematic methods for developing, reasoning about, and synthesizing specifications, architectures, and implementations for such systems. I exploit ...

Ownership domain annotations enable obtaining at compile-time the system's execution structure from the annotated program. The execution structure is sound, hierarchical (and thus more scalable) and conveys more design intent than flat object graphs ...

Software engineers often need to identify design defects, recurring design problems that hinder the development process, to improve and assess the quality of their systems. However, this is di±cult because of the lack of specifications and tools. We ...

We present CodeGenie, a tool that implements a test-driven approachto search and reuse of code available on large-scale coderepositories. While using CodeGenie developers design test cases fora desired feature first, similar to Test-driven Development (...

When a software system undergoes modification, a given change might need to be repeated throughout the codebase. While the change itself may not be difficult to implement, discovering other locations where this change should be applied (if any exist) ...

Programming language design remains a vital field, with interest in languages targeting concurrency, scripting, and aspects, as well as in domain-specific languages. Full-featured integrated development environments (IDEs) have become critical to the ...

Modular monadic semantics (MMS) is a well-known technique for structuring modular denotational semantic definitions. Families of language constructs are independently defined using syntactic functors and semantic algebras that can be combined in a mix-...

Product Derivation is one of the central activities in Software Product Lines (SPL). One of the main challenges of the process of product derivation is dealing with complexity, which is caused by the large number of artifacts and dependencies between ...

Flexibility and interoperability make web services well suited for designing highly-customizable reactive service-based applications, that is interactive applications that can be rapidly adapted to new requirements and environmental conditions. This is ...

Software developers often do not build software from scratch but reuse software libraries. In theory, the APIs of a library should be stable, but in practice they do change and thus require changes in software that reuses the library. Our previous study ...

A requirements specification for an individual software system should be consistent, i.e. free of contradictions. In product line engineering, the product line requirements specification comprises all the requirements common to all products of the ...

Concurrent programs are difficult to debug and verify because of the nondeterministic nature of concurrent executions. A particular concurrency-related bug may only show up under certain rarely-executed thread interleavings. Therefore, commonly used ...

As part of the evolution of software systems, effort is often invested to discover in what parts of the source code a feature (or other concern) is implemented. Unfortunately, knowledge about a concern's implementation can become invalid as the system ...

Programmers commonly reuse existing frameworks or libraries to reduce software development efforts. One common problem in reusing the existing frameworks or libraries is that the programmers know what type of object that they need, but do not know how ...

We introduce object ownership profiling, a technique forfinding and fixing memory leaks in object-oriented programs. Object ownership profiling is the first memory profiling technique that reports both a hierarchy of allocated objects along with size ...

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) separates crosscutting concerns from primary concerns. These concerns are woven together by a weaver. Although AOP provides an effective module mechanism, it is not necessarily easy for a programmer to understand the ...

Knowing which method parameters may be mutated during a method's executionis useful for many software engineering tasks. We present an approach todiscovering parameter reference immutability, in which several lightweight, scalable analyses are combined ...