Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Large Language Models For Qualitative Research In Software Engineering: Exploring Opportunities And Challenges, Muneera Bano, Rashina Hoda, Didar Zowghi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent surge in the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into qualitative research in software engineering, much like in other professional domains, demands a closer inspection. This vision paper seeks to explore the opportunities of using LLMs in qualitative research to address many of its legacy challenges as well as potential new concerns and pitfalls arising from the use of LLMs. We share our vision for the evolving role of the qualitative researcher in the age of LLMs and contemplate how they may utilize LLMs at various stages of their research experience.

Fixing Your Own Smells: Adding A Mistake-Based Familiarization Step When Teaching Code Refactoring, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code smells', which are specific negative characteristics (e.g. duplicate code) that can be resolved by applying refactoring patterns. Many undergraduate computing curricula train students on this software engineering practice, often doing so via exercises on unfamiliar instructor-provided code. Our observation, however, is that this makes it harder for novices to internalise refactoring as part of their own development practices. In this paper, we propose a …

Choosing A Sophisticated, Robust, And Secure Programming Language, J. Simon Richard

The Downtown Review

This paper explores which programming languages maximize the quality and efficiency of software development projects requiring high levels of sophistication, security, and stability. Of the four languages discussed in this paper—C, C++, Java, and Rust—we conclude that Rust is the best for this application.

Code Generation Based On Inference And Controlled Natural Language Input, Howard R. Dittmer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Over time the level of abstraction embodied in programming languages has continued to grow. Paradoxically, most programming languages still require programmers to conform to the language's rigid constructs. These constructs have been implemented in the name of efficiency for the computer. However, the continual increase in computing power allows us to consider techniques not so limited. To this end, we have created CABERNET, a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) based approach to program creation. CABERNET allows programmers to use a simple outline-based syntax. This syntax enables increased programmer efficiency.

CNLs have previously been used to document requirements. We have taken this …

Csc 71010/Csci 77100: Programming Languages/Software Engineering, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Reengineering And Refactoring, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Wala Quick Start, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

Setting up and trying the TJ Watson Library for Analysis (WALA).

Building An Ast Eclipse Plug-In, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

Complete the Building an AST Eclipse Plug-in assignment. Once it works, find a medium-sized open-source Java project to run your plugin on. You may want to explore GitHub. Import the project into Eclipse and run your plug-in on it. Report on the following, which may require you to change some of the source code so that it is convenient:

1. Project name.
2. Project URL.
3. Project description.
4. The number of classes in the project.
5. The number of user-defined methods in the project.
6. For each class, the number of method calls.
7. Statistics about the method calls:
   1. The total number of method calls …

Working With Control-Flow Graphs, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Eclipse, Osgi, And The Java Model, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Abstract Syntax Trees (Asts) And The Visitor Pattern, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Novel Deep Learning Methods Combined With Static Analysis For Source Code Processing, Duy Quoc Nghi Bui

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

It is desirable to combine machine learning and program analysis so that one can leverage the best of both to increase the performance of software analytics. On one side, machine learning can analyze the source code of thousands of well-written software projects that can uncover patterns that partially characterize software that is reliable, easy to read, and easy to maintain. On the other side, the program analysis can be used to define rigorous and unique rules that are only available in programming languages, which enrich the representation of source code and help the machine learning to capture the patterns better. …

Tests As Maintainable Assets Via Auto-Generated Spies: A Case Study Involving The Scala Collections Library's Iterator Trait, Konstantin Läufer, John O'Sullivan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

In testing stateful abstractions, it is often necessary to record interactions, such as method invocations, and express assertions over these interactions. Following the Test Spy design pattern, we can reify such interactions programmatically through additional mutable state. Alternatively, a mocking framework, such as Mockito, can automatically generate test spies that allow us to record the interactions and express our expectations in a declarative domain-specific language. According to our study of the test code for Scala’s Iterator trait, the latter approach can lead to a significant reduction of test code complexity in terms of metrics such as code size (in some …

Tests As Maintainable Assets Via Auto-Generated Spies: A Case Study Involving The Scala Collections Library's Iterator Trait, Konstantin Läufer, John O'Sullivan, George K. Thiruvathukal

George K. Thiruvathukal

In testing stateful abstractions, it is often necessary to record interactions, such as method invocations, and express assertions over these interactions. Following the Test Spy design pattern, we can reify such interactions programmatically through additional mutable state. Alternatively, a mocking framework, such as Mockito, can automatically generate test spies that allow us to record the interactions and express our expectations in a declarative domain-specific language. According to our study of the test code for Scala’s Iterator trait, the latter approach can lead to a significant reduction of test code complexity in terms of metrics such as code size (in some …

A Semantics Comparison Workbench For A Concurrent, Asynchronous, Distributed Programming Language, Claudio Corrodi, Alexander Heußner, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A number of high-level languages and libraries have been proposed that offer novel and simple to use abstractions for concurrent, asynchronous, and distributed programming. The execution models that realise them, however, often change over time---whether to improve performance, or to extend them to new language features---potentially affecting behavioural and safety properties of existing programs. This is exemplified by SCOOP, a message-passing approach to concurrent object-oriented programming that has seen multiple changes proposed and implemented, with demonstrable consequences for an idiomatic usage of its core abstraction. We propose a semantics comparison workbench for SCOOP with fully and semi-automatic tools for analysing …

Code Coverage And Postrelease Defects: A Large-Scale Study On Open Source Projects, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo, Julia Lawall, Nachiappan Nagappan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Testing is a pivotal activity in ensuring the quality of software. Code coverage is a common metric used as a yardstick to measure the efficacy and adequacy of testing. However, does higher coverage actually lead to a decline in postrelease bugs? Do files that have higher test coverage actually have fewer bug reports? The direct relationship between code coverage and actual bug reports has not yet been analyzed via a comprehensive empirical study on real bugs. Past studies only involve a few software systems or artificially injected bugs (mutants). In this empirical study, we examine these questions in the context …

Grace's Inheritance, James Noble, Andrew P. Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, Timothy Jones

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article is an apologia for the design of inheritance in the Grace educational programming language: it explains how the design of Grace’s inheritance draws from inheritance mechanisms in predecessor languages, and defends that design as the best of the available alternatives. For simplicity, Grace objects are generated from object constructors, like those of Emerald, Lua, and Javascript; for familiarity, the language also provides classes and inheritance, like Simula, Smalltalk and Java. The design question we address is whether or not object constructors can provide an inheritance semantics similar to classes.

Detecting Broken Pointcuts Using Structural Commonality And Degree Of Interest, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Awais Rashd, Hidehiko Masuhara, Takuya Watanabe

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. Deciding which pointcuts have broken due to base-code changes is daunting, especially in large and complex systems. We present an automated approach that recommends pointcuts that are likely to require modification due to a certain base-code change and ones that do not. Our hypothesis is that join points selected by a pointcut exhibit common structural characteristics. Patterns describing such commonalities recommend pointcuts that have potentially broken to the developer. The approach …

Pointcut Rejuvenation: Recovering Pointcut Expressions In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Phil Greenwood, Awais Rashid, Harry Xu

Publications and Research

Pointcut fragility is a well-documented problem in Aspect-Oriented Programming; changes to the base code can lead to join points incorrectly falling in or out of the scope of pointcuts. In this paper, we present an automated approach that limits fragility problems by providing mechanical assistance in pointcut maintenance. The approach is based on harnessing arbitrarily deep structural commonalities between program elements corresponding to join points selected by a pointcut. The extracted patterns are then applied to later versions to offer suggestions of new join points that may require inclusion. To illustrate that the motivation behind our proposal is well founded, …

Rejuvenate Pointcut: A Tool For Pointcut Expression Recovery In Evolving Aspect-Oriented Software, Raffi T. Khatchadourian, Awais Rashid

Publications and Research

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) strives to localize the scattered and tangled implementations of crosscutting concerns (CCCs) by allowing developers to declare that certain actions (advice) should be taken at specific points (join points) during the execution of software where a CCC (an aspect) is applicable. However, it is non-trivial to construct optimal pointcut expressions (a collection of join points) that capture the true intentions of the programmer and, upon evolution, maintain these intentions. We demonstrate an AspectJ source-level inferencing tool called rejuvenate pointcut which helps developers maintain pointcut expressions over the lifetime of a software product. A key insight into the …

Enhanced Risk Analysis-Relative Impact Factorization, Basit Shahzad, Tanveer Afzal, Rizwana Irfan

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Software engineering is an area of development which always has the risk factor present and software engineering can hardly be done on some straight line. So, the manager has to handle the dynamically changing circumstances in order to complete the job. The target of development team is to develop the software according to the requirements within specified time. Wide variety of risks I are present that may grab the development effort. A good manager must ensure that all measures have been taken against the risks that may possibly come. This paper focuses on determining the relative impact of risk factors …

Object-Oriented Programming And Parallelism, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

Initially, object-orientation and parallelism originated and developed as separate and relatively independent areas. During the last decade, however, more and more researchers were attracted by the benefits from a potential marriage of the two powerful paradigms. Numerous research projects and an increasing number of practical applications were aimed at different forms of amalgamation of parallelism with object-orientation. It has been realized that parallelism is a inherently needed enhancement for the traditional object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm, and that object orientation can add significant flexibility to the parallel programming paradigm.

Exploiting High Performance Fortran For Computational Fluid Dynamics, Volume 919, Ken Hawick, Geoffrey C. Fox

Northeast Parallel Architecture Center

We discuss the High Performance Fortran data parallel programming language as an aid to software engineering and as a tool for exploiting High Performance Computing systems for computational uid dynamics applications. We discuss the use of intrinsic functions, data distribution directives and explicitly parallel constructs to optimize performance by minimizing communications requirements in a portable manner. In particular we use an implicit method such as the ADI algorithm to illustrate the major issues. We focus on regular mesh problems, since these can be efficiently represented by the existing HPF definition, but also discuss issues arising from the use of irregular …

Introducing Objects And Parallelism To An Imperative Programming Language, Atanas Radenski

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

The problem of enhancing objects with parallelism has been in the focus of numerous research projects in the recent years, but a satisfactory and commonly accepted solution has not appeared yet. A major problematic point seems to be providing inheritance for parallel objects. The general objective of this paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the language design issues in the area of parallel object-oriented programming (OOP) and, in particular, to design a framework for parallel OOP with multiple inheritance. What makes our proposed framework different from the other parallel OOP languages is its easy to use and …