Software Engineering Commons^™

The Shifting Sands Of Motivation: Revisiting What Drives Contributors In Open Source, Marco Gerosa, Igor Wiese, Bianca Trinkenreich, Georg Link, Gregorio Robles, Christoph Treude, Igor Steinmacher, Anita Sarma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from the early 2000s. With the changed landscape of OSS, it is very likely that motivations to join OSS have also evolved. Through a survey of 242 OSS contributors, we investigate shifts in motivation from three perspectives: (1) the impact of the new OSS landscape, (2) the impact of individuals' personal growth …

Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Code Summarization Via Hybrid Gnn, Shangqing Liu, Yu Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Jingkai Siow, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Source code summarization aims to generate natural language summaries from structured code snippets for better understanding code functionalities. However, automatic code summarization is challenging due to the complexity of the source code and the language gap between the source code and natural language summaries. Most previous approaches either rely on retrieval-based (which can take advantage of similar examples seen from the retrieval database, but have low generalization performance) or generation-based methods (which have better generalization performance, but cannot take advantage of similar examples). This paper proposes a novel retrieval-augmented mechanism to combine the benefits of both worlds. Furthermore, to mitigate …

Automatic Web Testing Using Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning, Yan Zheng, Yi Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yepang Liu, Lei Ma, Jianye Hao, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web testing has long been recognized as a notoriously difficult task. Even nowadays, web testing still heavily relies on manual efforts while automated web testing is far from achieving human-level performance. Key challenges in web testing include dynamic content update and deep bugs hiding under complicated user interactions and specific input values, which can only be triggered by certain action sequences in the huge search space. In this paper, we propose WebExplor, an automatic end-to-end web testing framework, to achieve an adaptive exploration of web applications. WebExplor adopts curiosity-driven reinforcement learning to generate high-quality action sequences (test cases) satisfying temporal …

Prediction, Recommendation And Group Analytics Models In The Domain Of Mashup Services And Cyber-Argumentation Platform, Md Mahfuzer Rahman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mashup application development is becoming a widespread software development practice due to its appeal for a shorter application development period. Application developers usually use web APIs from different sources to create a new streamlined service and provide various features to end-users. This kind of practice saves time, ensures reliability, accuracy, and security in the developed applications. Mashup application developers integrate these available APIs into their applications. Still, they have to go through thousands of available web APIs and chose only a few appropriate ones for their application. Recommending relevant web APIs might help application developers in this situation. However, very …

Automated Query Reformulation For Efficient Search Based On Query Logs From Stack Overflow, Kaibo Cao, Chunyang Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, Xiang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a popular Q&A site for programming, Stack Overflow is a treasure for developers. However, the amount of questions and answers on Stack Overflow make it difficult for developers to efficiently locate the information they are looking for. There are two gaps leading to poor search results: the gap between the user's intention and the textual query, and the semantic gap between the query and the post content. Therefore, developers have to constantly reformulate their queries by correcting misspelled words, adding limitations to certain programming languages or platforms, etc. As query reformulation is tedious for developers, especially for novices, we …

Research Artifact: The Potential Of Meta-Maintenance On Github, Hideaki Hata, Raula Kula, Takashi Ishio, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This is a research artifact for the paper “Same File, Different Changes: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub”. This artifact is a data repository including a list of studied 32,007 repositories on GitHub, a list of targeted 401,610,677 files, the results of the qualitative analysis for RQ2, RQ3, and RQ4, the results of the quantitative analysis for RQ5, and survey material for RQ6. The purpose of this artifact is enabling researchers to replicate our mixed-methods results of the paper, and to reuse the results of our exploratory study for further software engineering research. This research artifact is available at https://github.com/NAIST-SE/MetaMaintenancePotential …

Characterization And Prediction Of Questions Without Accepted Answers On Stack Overflow, Mohamad Yazdaninia, David Lo, Ashkan Sami

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A fast and effective approach to obtain information regarding software development problems is to search them to find similar solved problems or post questions on community question answering (CQA) websites. Solving coding problems in a short time is important, so these CQAs have a considerable impact on the software development process. However, if developers do not get their expected answers, the websites will not be useful, and software development time will increase. Stack Overflow is the most popular CQA concerning programming problems. According to its rules, the only sign that shows a question poser has achieved the desired answer is …

Low-Power Downlink For The Internet Of Things Using Ieee 802.11-Compliant Wake-Up Receivers, Johannes Blobel, Vu Huy Tran, Archan Misra, Falko Dressler

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ultra-low power communication is critical for supporting the next generation of battery-operated or energy harvesting battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Duty cycling protocols and wake-up receiver (WuRx) technologies, and their combinations, have been investigated as energy-efficient mechanisms to support selective, event-driven activation of devices. In this paper, we go one step further and show how WuRx can be used for an efficient and multi-purpose low power downlink (LPD) communication channel. We demonstrate how to (a) extend the wake-up signal to support low-power flexible and extensible unicast, multicast, and broadcast downlink communication and (b) utilize the WuRx-based LPD to also …

Smart Contract Security: A Practitioners' Perspective, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Jiachi Chen, Xiapu Luo, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts have been plagued by security incidents, which resulted in substantial financial losses. Given numerous research efforts in addressing the security issues of smart contracts, we wondered how software practitioners build security into smart contracts in practice. We performed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies with 13 interviewees and 156 survey respondents from 35 countries across six continents to understand practitioners' perceptions and practices on smart contract security. Our study uncovers practitioners' motivations and deterrents of smart contract security, as well as how security efforts and strategies fit into the development lifecycle. We also find that blockchain platforms …

Heart Rhythm Classification From Static And Ecg Time-Series Data Using Hybrid Multimodal Deep Learning, Ahmad Abdulrazaq Abdulla Alnajjar

Theses

Cardiovascular arrhythmia diseases are considered as the most common diseases that cause death around the world. Abnormal arrhythmia diseases can be identified by analyzing heart rhythm using an electrocardiogram (ECG). However, this analysis is done manually by cardiologists, which may be subjective and susceptible to different cardiologist observations and experiences, as well as to noise and irregularities in those signals. This can lead to misdiagnosis. Motivated by this challenge, an automated heart rhythm diagnosis approach from ECG signals using Deep Learning has been proposed. In order to achieve this goal, three research problems have been addressed. First, recognize the role …

App Development For Wearable Sensors, Connor Pittman, Christopher Chappie, Patrick A. Tetreault

Thinking Matters Symposium

The objective of this research project was to create a wearable device that monitors bodily functions for the user to view on their smartphone. Sensor data is processed using the Arduino Nano 33 BLE microcontroller. The sensors used in this project include: proximity, temperature, humidity, heart rate, pressure, and skin impedance. This project takes advantage of the Arduino's Bluetooth low energy (BLE) capabilities so that all the data can be transmitted to a smartphone. This presentation shows the challenges faced during the project and how they were overcome. Some of these challenges include: programming, how heart rate sensors work, and …

A Deep Analysis And Algorithmic Approach To Solving Complex Fitness Issues In Collegiate Student Athletes, Holly N. Puckett

Honors College Theses

Sports are not simply an entertainment source. For many, it creates a sense of community, support, and trust among both fans and athletes alike. In order to continue the sense of community sports provides, athletes must be properly cared for in order to perform at the highest level possible. Thus, their fitness and health must be monitored continuously. In a professional sense, one can expect individualized attention to athletes daily due to an abundance of funding and resources. However, when looking at college communities and student athletes within them, the number of athletes per athletic trainer increases due to both …

Shedding Light On Dark Patterns: A Case Study On Digital Harms, Noreen Y. Whysel

Publications and Research

You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but found out later that they blabbed to everyone. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. You gave more than you got and it didn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?

Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket. Or your bank. Or your boss.

As designers of digital spaces for consumer products and services, how often do we consider the relationship we have with our …

Exploring Ai And Multiplayer In Java, Ronni Kurtzhals

Student Academic Conference

I conducted research into three topics: artificial intelligence, package deployment, and multiplayer servers in Java. This research came together to form my project presentation on the implementation of these topics, which I felt accurately demonstrated the various things I have learned from my courses at Moorhead State University. Several resources were consulted throughout the project, including the work of W3Schools and StackOverflow as well as relevant assignments and textbooks from previous classes. I found this project relevant to computer science and information systems for several reasons, such as the AI component and use of SQL data tables; but it was …

Student Academic Conference, Caitlin Brooks

Student Academic Conference

No abstract provided.

Poker Chip Calculator Application, Ryan Illies

Student Academic Conference

Application to help start up in person poker games with friends.

Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System, Justin Tank

Masters Theses & Doctoral Dissertations

The Olmsted Non-Hazardous Industrial Solid Waste Tracking System allows waste generators of certain materials to electronically have their waste assessments evaluated, approved, and tracked through a simple online process. The current process of manually requesting evaluations, prepopulating tracking forms, and filling them out on triplicate carbonless forms is out of sync with other processes in the department. Complying with audit requirements requires pulling physical copies and providing them physically to fulfill information requests.

Waste generators in Minnesota are required to track their waste disposals for certain types of industrial waste streams. This ensures waste is accounted for at the point …

Automated Evolution Of Feature Logging Statement Levels Using Git Histories And Degree Of Interest, Yiming Tang, Allan Spektor, Raffi Khatchadourian, Mehdi Bagherzadeh

Publications and Research

Logging—used for system events and security breaches to more informational yet essential aspects of software features—is pervasive. Given the high transactionality of today’s software, logging effectiveness can be reduced by information overload. Log levels help alleviate this problem by correlating a priority to logs that can be later filtered. As software evolves, however, levels of logs documenting surrounding feature implementations may also require modification as features once deemed important may have decreased in urgency and vice-versa. We present an automated approach that assists developers in evolving levels of such (feature) logs. The approach, based on mining Git histories and manipulating …

Taiger Ai: Saas Bundling And Unbundling, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Software companies bundle support services with their products as standard practice. Is it possible to be different…and profitable?

Looking Back! Using Early Versions Of Android Apps As Attack Vectors, Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jia-Si Wneg, Lin Hou, Anjia Yang, Ming Li, Yang Xiang, Deng, Robert H.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android platform is gaining explosive popularity. This leads developers to invest resources to maintain the upward trajectory of the demand. Unfortunately, as the profit potential grows higher, the chances of these Apps getting attacked also get higher. Therefore, developers improved the security of their Apps, which limits attackers ability to compromise upgraded versions of the Apps. However, developers cannot enhance the security of earlier versions that have been released on the Play Store. The earlier versions of the App can be subject to reverse engineering and other attacks. In this paper, we find that attackers can use these earlier versions …

Machine Learning Based Approaches Towards Robust Android Malware Detection, Jiayun Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The Android platform is becoming increasingly popular and numerous applications (apps) have been developed by organizations to meet the ever increasing market demand over years. Naturally, security and privacy concerns on Android apps have grabbed considerable attention from both academic and industrial
communities. Many approaches have been proposed to detect Android malware in different ways so far, and most of them produce satisfactory performance under the given Android environment settings and labelled samples. However, existing approaches suffer the following robustness problems:

In many Android malware detection approaches, specific API calls are used to build the feature sets, and their feature …

Tour: Dynamic Topic And Sentiment Analysis Of User Reviews For Assisting App Release, Tianyi Yang, Cuiyun Gao, Jingya Zang, David Lo, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

App reviews deliver user opinions and emerging issues (e.g., new bugs) about the app releases. Due to the dynamic nature of app reviews, topics and sentiment of the reviews would change along with app release versions. Although several studies have focused on summarizing user opinions by analyzing user sentiment towards app features, no practical tool is released. The large quantity of reviews and noise words also necessitates an automated tool for monitoring user reviews. In this paper, we introduce TOUR for dynamic TOpic and sentiment analysis of User Reviews. TOUR is able to (i) detect and summarize emerging app issues …

Do Users Care About Ad's Performance Costs? Exploring The Effects Of The Performance Costs Of In-App Ads On User Experience, Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, Federica Sarro, David Lo, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: In-app advertising is the primary source of revenue for many mobile apps. The cost of advertising (ad cost) is non-negligible for app developers to ensure a good user experience and continuous profits. Previous studies mainly focus on addressing the hidden performance costs generated by ads, including consumption of memory, CPU, data traffic, and battery. However, there is no research on analyzing users’ perceptions of ads’ performance costs to our knowledge.Objective: To fill this gap and better understand the effects of performance costs of in-app ads on user experience, we conduct a study on analyzing user concerns about ads’ performance …

Proximity-Based Video Communication With Cocktailparty, Addison Fabry, William Heffernan, Andrew Shroyer

Senior Theses

CocktailParty is a video communication application designed to uniquely and efficiently solve the problems faced by traditional online video communication. The proposal for this start-up project was accepted in August 2020. CocktailParty enables users to join a video chat room overlayed on top of a virtual house, in which each user can move their own video feed around the house. Each room in each house layout hosts a different video call, allowing users to easily host large virtual gatherings that facilitate multiple conversations taking place simultaneously. This functionality makes important steps towards effective simulation of the real-life gathering experience.

Best Practices In Industry And Cse Senior Design, Conner Hallett

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The widespread use of Agile practices in the software development industry creates the need for new college graduates to be adept in Agile processes and teams. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Senior Design courses gives students an introduction to such processes, but is met with many challenges in doing so, such as time constraints and student inexperience. Following a detailed look at the Scrum Agile framework and its expanded practices in industry, potential improvements for CSE Senior Design’s practice of Agile are suggested. These include the creation of resource forums for students to accelerate the early …

How Successful Are Open Source Contributions From Countries With Different Levels Of Human Development?, Leonardo Furtado, Bruno Cartaxo, Christoph Treude, Gustavo Pinto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article we studied whether developers? locations relate to the outcome of a pull request (PR). Our results suggest that developers from countries with low human development indexes perform a small fraction of the overall PRs and are the ones that face rejection the most.

Spectest: Specification-Based Compiler Testing, Richard Schumi, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Compilers are error-prone due to their high complexity. They are relevant for not only general purpose programming languages, but also for many domain specific languages. Bugs in compilers can potentially render all programs at risk. It is thus crucial that compilers are systematically tested, if not verified. Recently, a number of efforts have been made to formalise and standardise programming language semantics, which can be applied to verify the correctness of the respective compilers. In this work, we present a novel specification-based testing method named SpecTest to better utilise these semantics for testing. By applying an executable semantics as test …

Detection Of Social Identification In Workgroups From A Passively-Sensed Wifi Infrastructure, Camelia Zakaria, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social identification: how much individuals psychologically associate themselves with a group has been posited as an essential construct to measure individual and group dynamics. Studies have shown that individuals who identify very differently from their workgroup provides critical cues to the lack of social support or work overloads. However, measuring identification is typically achieved through time-consuming and privacy invasive surveys. We hypothesize that the extremitized in-group norm affects individuals' behaviors, thus more likely to give rise to negative appraisals. As a more convenient and less-invasive technique, we propose a method to predict individuals who are increasingly different in identifying themselves …

Practical Server-Side Wifi-Based Indoor Localization: Addressing Cardinality & Outlier Challenges For Improved Occupancy Estimation, Anuradha Ravi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Server-side WiFi-based indoor localization offers a compelling approach for passive occupancy estimation (i.e., without requiring active participation by client devices, such as smartphones carried by visitors), but is known to suffer from median error of 6–8 meters. By analyzing the characteristics of an operationally-deployed, WiFi-based passive indoor location system, based on the classical RADAR algorithm, we identify and tackle 2 practical challenges for accurate individual device localization. The first challenge is the low-cardinality issue, whereby only the associated AP generates sufficiently frequent RSSI reports, causing a client to experience large localization error due to the absence of sufficient measurements from …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind? How Vulnerable Dependencies Affect Open-Source Projects, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana, Abhishek Sharma, Lwin Khin Shar, Darius Foo, Andrew E. Santosa, Asankhaya Sharma, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Software developers often use open-source libraries in their project to improve development speed. However, such libraries may contain security vulnerabilities, and this has resulted in several high-profile incidents in re- cent years. As usage of open-source libraries grows, understanding of these dependency vulnerabilities becomes increasingly important. Objective: In this work, we analyze vulnerabilities in open-source libraries used by 450 software projects written in Java, Python, and Ruby. Our goal is to examine types, distribution, severity, and persistence of the vulnerabili- ties, along with relationships between their prevalence and project as well as commit attributes. Method: Our data is obtained …