Software Engineering Commons^™

Social Software Development: Insights And Solutions, Abhishek Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over last few decades, the way software is developed has changed drastically. From being an activity performed by developers working individually to develop standalone programs, it has transformed into a highly collaborative and cooperative activity. Software development today can be considered as a participatory culture, where developers coordinate and engage together to develop software while continuously learning from one another and creating knowledge.

In order to support their communication and collaboration needs, software developers often use a variety of social media channels. These channels help software developers to connect with like-minded developers and explore collaborations on software projects of interest. …

Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study reports the use of a physical robot and robot simulator in an introductory programming course in a university and measures students' programming background conceptual learning gain and learning experience. One group used physical robots in their lessons to complete programming assignments, while the other group used robot simulators. We are interested in finding out if there is any difference in the learning gain and experiences between those that use physical robots as compared to robot simulators. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in terms of students' learning between the two approaches. However, the control group …

Automatically `Verifying’ Discrete-Time Complex Systems Through Learning, Abstraction And Refinement, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Shengchao Qin, Cyrille Jegourel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Precisely modeling complex systems like cyber-physical systems is challenging, which often render model-based system verification techniques like model checking infeasible. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method called LAR to automatically ‘verify’ such complex systems through a combination of learning, abstraction and refinement from a set of system log traces. We assume that log traces and sampling frequency are adequate to capture ‘enough’ behaviour of the system. Given a safety property and the concrete system log traces as input, LAR automatically learns and refines system models, and produces two kinds of outputs. One is a counterexample with a bounded …

Co-Location Resistant Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to increasing number of avenues for conducting cross-virtual machine (VM) side-channel attacks, the security of public IaaS cloud data centers is a growing concern. These attacks allow an adversary to steal private information from a target user whose VM instance is co-located with that of the adversary. To reduce the probability of malicious co-location, we propose a novel VM placement algorithm called “Previously Co-Located Users First”. We perform a theoretical and empirical analysis of our proposed algorithm to evaluate its resource efficiency and security. Our results, obtained using real-world cloud traces containing millions of VM requests and thousands of …

Fogfly: A Traffic Light Optimization Solution Based On Fog Computing, Quang Tran Minh, Chanh Minh Tran, Tuan An Le, Binh Thai Nguyen, Triet Minh Tran, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper provides a fog-based approach to solving the traffic light optimization problem which utilizes the Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) model. ATSC systems demand the ability to strictly reflect real-time traffic state. The proposed fog computing framework, namely FogFly, aligns with this requirement by its natures in location-awareness, low latency and affordability to the changes in traffic conditions. As traffic data is updated timely and processed at fog nodes deployed close to data sources (i.e., vehicles at intersections) traffic light cycles can be optimized efficiently while virtualized resources available at network edges are efficiently utilized. Evaluation results show that …

Mobility-Driven Ble Transmit-Power Adaptation For Participatory Data Muling, Chung-Kyun Han, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper analyzes a human-centric framework, called SmartABLE, for easy retrieval of the sensor values from pervasively deployed smart objects in a campus-like environment. In this framework, smartphones carried by campus occupants act as data mules, opportunistically retrieving data from nearby BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) equipped smart object sensors and relaying them to a backend repository. We focus specifically on dynamically varying the transmission power of the deployed BLE beacons, so as to extend their operational lifetime without sacrificing the frequency of sensor data retrieval. We propose a memetic algorithm-based power adaptation strategy that can handle deployments of thousands of …

Privacy-Preserving Remote User Authentication With K-Times Untraceability, Yangguang Tian, Yingjiu Li, Binanda Sengupta, Robert H. Deng, Albert Ching, Weiwei Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote user authentication has found numerous real-world applications, especially in a user-server model. In this work, we introduce the notion of anonymous remote user authentication with k-times untraceability (k-RUA) for a given parameter k, where authorized users authenticate themselves to an authority (typically a server) in an anonymous and k-times untraceable manner. We define the formal security models for a generic k-RUA construction that guarantees user authenticity, anonymity and user privacy. We provide a concrete instantiation of k-RUA having the following properties: (1) a third party cannot impersonate an authorized user by producing valid transcripts for the user while conversing …

Early Prediction Of Merged Code Changes To Prioritize Reviewing Tasks, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern Code Review (MCR) has been widely used by open source and proprietary software projects. Inspecting code changes consumes reviewers much time and effort since they need to comprehend patches, and many reviewers are often assigned to review many code changes. Note that a code change might be eventually abandoned, which causes waste of time and effort. Thus, a tool that predicts early on whether a code change will be merged can help developers prioritize changes to inspect, accomplish more things given tight schedule, and not waste reviewing effort on low quality changes. In this paper, motivated by the above …

Delta Debugging Microservice Systems, Xiang Zhou, Xin Peng, Tao Xie, Jun Sun, Wenhai Li, Chao Ji, Dan Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Debugging microservice systems involves the deployment and manipulation of microservice systems on a containerized environment and faces unique challenges due to the high complexity and dynamism of microservices. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a debugging approach for microservice systems based on the delta debugging algorithm, which is to minimize failureinducing deltas of circumstances (e.g., deployment, environmental configurations) for effective debugging. Our approach includes novel techniques for defining, deploying/manipulating, and executing deltas following the idea of delta debugging. In particular, to construct a (failing) circumstance space for delta debugging to minimize, our approach defines a set of …

Improving Reusability Of Software Libraries Through Usage Pattern Mining, Mohamed Aymen Saied, Ali Ouni, Houari A. Sahraoui, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Katsuro Inoue, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software systems are increasingly dependent on third-party libraries. It is widely recognized that using mature and well-tested third-party libraries can improve developers’ productivity, reduce time-to-market, and produce more reliable software. Today’s open-source repositories provide a wide range of libraries that can be freely downloaded and used. However, as software libraries are documented separately but intended to be used together, developers are unlikely to fully take advantage of these reuse opportunities. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically identify third-party library usage patterns, i.e., collections of libraries that are commonly used together by developers. Our approach employs …

Recommending Who To Follow In The Software Engineering Twitter Space, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, Dinusha Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape.” Unfortunately, due to the general-purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets.To help developers perform this task, in …

Learning Probabilistic Models For Model Checking: An Evolutionary Approach And An Empirical Study, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Qixia Yuan, Jun Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many automated system analysis techniques (e.g., model checking, model-based testing) rely on first obtaining a model of the system under analysis. System modeling is often done manually, which is often considered as a hindrance to adopt model-based system analysis and development techniques. To overcome this problem, researchers have proposed to automatically “learn” models based on sample system executions and shown that the learned models can be useful sometimes. There are however many questions to be answered. For instance, how much shall we generalize from the observed samples and how fast would learning converge? Or, would the analysis result based on …

Learning Generalized Video Memory For Automatic Video Captioning, Poo-Hee Chang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent video captioning methods have made great progress by deep learning approaches with convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN). While there are techniques that use memory networks for sentence decoding, few work has leveraged on the memory component to learn and generalize the temporal structure in video. In this paper, we propose a new method, namely Generalized Video Memory (GVM), utilizing a memory model for enhancing video description generation. Based on a class of self-organizing neural networks, GVM’s model is able to learn new video features incrementally. The learned generalized memory is further exploited to decode the …

Infar: Insight Extraction From App Reviews, Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, David Lo, Chin-Yew Lin, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

App reviews play an essential role for users to convey their feedback about using the app. The critical information contained in app reviews can assist app developers for maintaining and updating mobile apps. However, the noisy nature and large-quantity of daily generated app reviews make it difficult to understand essential information carried in app reviews. Several prior studies have proposed methods that can automatically classify or cluster user reviews into a few app topics (e.g., security). These methods usually act on a static collection of user reviews. However, due to the dynamic nature of user feedback (i.e., reviews keep coming …

Identifying Elderly With Poor Sleep Quality Using Unobtrusive In-Home Sensors For Early Intervention, Xiaoping Ma, W K P Neranjana Nadee Rodrigo Goonawardene, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Along with the upward trend in population ageing is the increasing proportion of the elderly population living alone in the community. This group is especially vulnerable as the onset of various physical, social and mental health issues may be more likely and may go undetected. However, smart homes enabled with elderly monitoring and care systems (EMCS) can now be used to alert caregivers of anomalies in the daily living patterns of the elderly. In this study, we focus on the sleep quality as the key living pattern, as it has been shown that poor sleep quality can lead to health …

Artefact: An R Implementation Of The Autospearman Function, Jirayus Jiarpakdee, Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This artefact is the implementation of AutoSpearman, an automated metric selection approach based on correlation analyses. The goal of AutoSpearman is to automatically mitigate correlated metrics prior to constructing analytical models. This artefact is implemented as an R package and is available in the GitHub repository. We provide descriptions and R code snippets for the installation of AutoSpearman and usage examples.

Autospearman: Automatically Mitigating Correlated Software Metrics For Interpreting Defect Models, Jirayus Jiarpakdee, Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The interpretation of defect models heavily relies on software metrics that are used to construct them. However, such software metrics are often correlated in defect models. Prior work often uses feature selection techniques to remove correlated metrics in order to improve the performance of defect models. Yet, the interpretation of defect models may be misleading if feature selection techniques produce subsets of inconsistent and correlated metrics. In this paper, we investigate the consistency and correlation of the subsets of metrics that are produced by nine commonly-used feature selection techniques. Through a case study of 13 publicly-available defect datasets, we find …

Ten Years Of Hunting For Similar Code For Fun And Profit (Keynote), Stephane Glondu, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In 2007, the Deckard paper was published at ICSE. Since its publication, it has led to much follow-up research and applications. The paper made two core contributions: a novel vector embedding of structured code for fast similarity detection, and an application of the embedding for clone detection, resulting in the Deckard tool. The vector embedding is simple and easy to adapt. Similar code detection is also fundamental for a range of classical and emerging problems in software engineering, security, and computer science education (e.g., code reuse, refactoring, porting, translation, synthesis, program repair, malware detection, and feedback generation). Both have buttressed …

Dsm: A Specification Mining Tool Using Recurrent Neural Network Based Language Model, Tien-Duy B. Le, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Formal specifications are important but often unavailable. Furthermore, writing these specifications is time-consuming and requires skills from developers. In this work, we present Deep Specification Miner (DSM), an automated tool that applies deep learning to mine finite-state automaton (FSA) based specifications. DSM accepts as input a set of execution traces to train a Recurrent Neural Network Language Model (RNNLM). From the input traces, DSM creates a Prefix Tree Acceptor (PTA) and leverages the inferred RNNLM to extract many features. These features are then forwarded to clustering algorithms for merging similar automata states in the PTA for assembling a number of …

Using Finite-State Models For Log Differencing, Hen Amar, Lingfeng Bao, Nimrod Busany, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Much work has been published on extracting various kinds of models from logs that document the execution of running systems. In many cases, however, for example in the context of evolution, testing, or malware analysis, engineers are interested not only in a single log but in a set of several logs, each of which originated from a different set of runs of the system at hand. Then, the difference between the logs is the main target of interest. In this work we investigate the use of finite-state models for log differencing. Rather than comparing the logs directly, we generate concise …

An Interpretable Neural Fuzzy Inference System For Predictions Of Underpricing In Initial Public Offerings, Di Wang, Xiaolin Qian, Chai Quek, Ah-Hwee Tan, Chunyan Miao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Geok See Ng, You Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to their aptitude in both accurate data processing and human comprehensible reasoning, neural fuzzy inference systems have been widely adopted in various application domains as decision support systems. Especially in real-world scenarios such as decision making in financial transactions, the human experts may be more interested in knowing the comprehensive reasons of certain advices provided by a decision support system in addition to how confident the system is on such advices. In this paper, we apply an integrated autonomous computational model termed genetic algorithm and rough set incorporated neural fuzzy inference system (GARSINFIS) to predict underpricing in initial public …

Aligning Technical Debt Prioritization With Business Objectives: A Multiple-Case Study, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Uirá Kulesza, Christoph Treude, D’Angellys Cavalcanti Feitosa, Aliandro Higino Guedes Lima

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor to describe the trade-off between short-term workarounds and long-term goals in software development. Despite being widely used to explain technical issues in business terms, industry and academia still lack a proper way to manage technical debt while explicitly considering business priorities. In this paper, we report on a multiple-case study of how two big software development companies handle technical debt items, and we show how taking the business perspective into account can improve the decision making for the prioritization of technical debt. We also propose a first step toward an approach that uses business …

Vt-Revolution: Interactive Programming Tutorials Made Possible, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming video tutorials showcase programming tasks and associated workflows. Although video tutorials are easy to create, it isoften difficult to explore the captured workflows and interact withthe programs in the videos. In this work, we propose a tool named VTRevolution – an interactive programming video tutorial authoring system. VTRevolution has two components: 1) a tutorial authoring system leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming video tutorials; 2) a tutorial watching system enhances the learning experience of video tutorials by providing operation history and timeline-based browsing interactions. Our tutorial authoring system does not …

On The Sequential Massart Algorithm For Statistical Model Checking, Cyrille Jegourel, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several schemes have been provided in Statistical Model Checking (SMC) for the estimation of property occurrence based on predefined confidence and absolute or relative error. Simulations might be however costly if many samples are required and the usual algorithms implemented in statistical model checkers tend to be conservative. Bayesian and rare event techniques can be used to reduce the sample size but they can not be applied without prerequisite or knowledge about the system under scrutiny. Recently, sequential algorithms based on Monte Carlo estimations and Massart bounds have been proposed to reduce the sample size while providing guarantees on error …

March Of The Silent Bots, Paul Robert Griffin

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Self-intelligent software robots, or ‘bots’ are everywhere. These small pieces of code run automated tasks when you order a taxi, search for a restaurant or check the weather. Quietly beavering away, it is unknown how many bots exist, but undoubtedly this number is set to surge over time. Already, bots comprise roughly half of all internet traffic.

Disruptive Technology: Can The Banking Industry Harness Disruption For Competitive Edge?, Edgar Low

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Disruptive innovation was identified as a phenomenon more than two decades ago by prominent Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen. So you may wonder why established industries are only now waking up to the prospect of digital transformation - the banking industry in particular.

Measuring Program Comprehension: A Large-Scale Field Study With Professionals, Xin Xia, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo, Zhengchang Xing, Ahmed E. Hassan, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During software development and maintenance, developers spend a considerable amount of time on program comprehension activities. Previous studies show that program comprehension takes up as much as half of a developer's time. However, most of these studies are performed in a controlled setting, or with a small number of participants, and investigate the program comprehension activities only within the IDEs. However, developers' program comprehension activities go well beyond their IDE interactions. In this paper, we extend our ActivitySpace framework to collect and analyze Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) data across many applications (not just the IDEs). We follow Minelli et al.'s approach …

I4s: Capturing Shopper’S In-Store Interactions, Sougata Sen, Archan Misra, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Karan Grover, Meeralakshmi Radhakrishnan, Rajesh K. Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present I4S, a system that identifies item interactions of customers in a retail store through sensor data fusion from smartwatches, smartphones and distributed BLE beacons. To identify these interactions, I4S builds a gesture-triggered pipeline that (a) detects the occurrence of “item picks”, and (b) performs fine-grained localization of such pickup gestures. By analyzing data collected from 31 shoppers visiting a mid-sized stationary store, we show that we can identify person-independent picking gestures with a precision of over 88%, and identify the rack from where the pick occurred with 91%+ precision (for popular racks).

Revisiting Supervised And Unsupervised Models For Effort-Aware Just-In-Time Defect Prediction, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effort-aware just-in-time (JIT) defect prediction aims at finding more defective software changes with limited code inspection cost. Traditionally, supervised models have been used; however, they require sufficient labelled training data, which is difficult to obtain, especially for new projects. Recently, Yang et al. proposed an unsupervised model (i.e., LT) and applied it to projects with rich historical bug data. Interestingly, they reported that, under the same inspection cost (i.e., 20 percent of the total lines of code modified by all changes), it could find about 12% - 27% more defective changes than a state-of-the-art supervised model (i.e., EALR) when using …

Function Risk Assessment Under Memory Leakage, Jianming Fu, Rui Jin, Yan Lin, Baihe Jiang, Zhengwei Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code reuse attack (CRA), specifically reusing and then reconstructing the codes (gadgets) already existed in programs and libraries, is widely exploited in software attacks. Admittedly, determination of the location of the gadgets consisted of target instructions along with control flow transfer instructions, is of critical importance. Address Space Randomization (ASR), which serves as an effective technique to mitigate CRA, increases the entropy by randomizing the location of the code or data, and baffles adversaries from figuring out the memory layout. Currently, variable randomization methods of high granularity are proposed by scholars to prevent adversaries from deducting memory layout. However, their …