research-article

Software change contracts

Authors:

Abhik RoychoudhuryAuthors Info & Claims

FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Article No.: 22, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/2393596.2393622

Published: 11 November 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Incorrect program changes including regression bugs, incorrect bug-fixes, incorrect feature updates are pervasive in software. These incorrect program changes affect software quality and are difficult to detect/correct. In this paper, we propose the notion of "change contracts" to avoid incorrect program changes. Change contracts formally specify the intended effect of program changes. Incorrect program changes are detected when they are checked with respect to the change contracts. We design a change contract language for Java programs and a dynamic checking system for our change contract language. We conduct a preliminary user study to check the expressiveness of our change contract language and find that the language is expressive enough to capture a wide variety of real-life changes in three large software projects (i.e., Ant, JMeter, log4j). Finally, our contract checking system detects several real-life incorrect changes in these three software projects via runtime checking of the change contracts.

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Cited By

Menarini MYan YGriswold WRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)Semantics-assisted code review: an efficient toolchain and a user studyProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155632(554-565)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155632
Menarini MYan YGriswold W(2017)Semantics-assisted code review: An efficient tool chain and a user study2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE.2017.8115666(554-565)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115666
Yi JQi DTan SRoychoudhury A(2015)Software Change ContractsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/272997324:3(1-43)Online publication date: 13-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2729973
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Software change contracts
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Reliability
    2. Validation
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. System description languages
      1. Specification languages

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Software errors often originate from incorrect changes, including incorrect program fixes, incorrect feature updates and so on. Capturing the intended program behavior explicitly via contracts is thus an attractive proposition. In our recent work, we ...

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

FSE '12: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2012

494 pages

ISBN:9781450316149

DOI:10.1145/2393596

General Chair:
Will Tracz
Lockheed Martin Fellow Emeritus
,
Program Chairs:
Martin Robillard
McGill University
,
Tevfik Bultan
University of California, Santa Barbara

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 November 2012

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Ministry of Education - Singapore

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SIGSOFT/FSE'12

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

SIGSOFT/FSE'12: 20th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 11 - 16, 2012

North Carolina, Cary

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Overall Acceptance Rate 17 of 128 submissions, 13%

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Cited By

Menarini MYan YGriswold WRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)Semantics-assisted code review: an efficient toolchain and a user studyProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155632(554-565)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155632
Menarini MYan YGriswold W(2017)Semantics-assisted code review: An efficient tool chain and a user study2017 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE.2017.8115666(554-565)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115666
Yi JQi DTan SRoychoudhury A(2015)Software Change ContractsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/272997324:3(1-43)Online publication date: 13-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2729973
Dimopoulos SKrintz CWolski RGupta A(2015)SuperContraProceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering10.1109/IC2E.2015.70(283-286)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/IC2E.2015.70
Le TYi JLo DThung FRoychoudhury A(2014)Dynamic Inference of Change ContractsProceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution10.1109/ICSME.2014.72(451-455)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSME.2014.72
Yi JQi DTan SRoychoudhury APezzè MHarman M(2013)Expressing and checking intended changes via software change contractsProceedings of the 2013 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2483760.2483772(1-11)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2483760.2483772

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