Software Engineering Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Release Note Production And Usage In Practice, Tingting Bi, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Thomas Zimmermann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The release note is one of the most important software artifacts that serves as a bridge for communication among stakeholders. Release notes contain a set of crucial information, such as descriptions of enhancements, improvements, potential issues, development, evolution, testing, and maintenance of projects throughout the whole development lifestyle. A comprehensive understanding of what makes a good release note and how to write one for different stakeholders would be highly beneficial. However, in practice, the release note is often neglected by stakeholders and has not to date been systematically investigated by researchers. In this paper, we conduct a mixed methods study …

Perceptions, Expectations, And Challenges In Defect Prediction, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, Ahmed E. Hassan, David Lo, Jianwei Yin, Xiaohu Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Defect prediction has been an active research area for over four decades. Despite numerous studies on defect prediction, the potential value of defect prediction in practice remains unclear. To address this issue, we performed a mixed qualitative and quantitative study to investigate what practitioners think, behave and expect in contrast to research findings when it comes to defect prediction. We collected hypotheses from open-ended interviews and a literature review, followed by a validation survey. We received 395 responses from practitioners. Some of our key findings include: 1) Over 90% of respondents are willing to adopt defect prediction techniques. 2) There …

"Authors On The Hill " Presents Prof. Giovanni Spani, Giovanni Spani

Authors on the Hill

Professor Giovanni Spani of the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Department at the College of the Holy Cross will present his work on Dante's Florence, a multimedia educational app for Android and iOS.

How Practitioners Perceive Automated Bug Report Management Techniques, Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Zhenyu Chen, Xin Xia, Yang Feng, Baowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bug reports play an important role in the process of debugging and fixing bugs. To reduce the burden of bug report managers and facilitate the process of bug fixing, a great amount of software engineering research has been invested into automated bug report management techniques. However, the verdict is still open whether such techniques are actually required and applicable outside of the theoretical research domain. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conducted a survey among 327 practitioners to gain their insights into various categories of automated bug report management techniques. Specifically, in the survey, we asked them to …

Chaff From The Wheat: Characterizing And Determining Valid Bug Reports, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers use bug reports to triage and fix bugs. When triaging a bug report, developers must decide whether the bug report is valid (i.e., a real bug). A large amount of bug reports are submitted every day, with many of them end up being invalid reports. Manually determining valid bug report is a difficult and tedious task. Thus, an approach that can automatically analyze the validity of a bug report and determine whether a report is valid can help developers prioritize their triaging tasks and avoid wasting time and effort on invalid bug reports. In this study, motivated by the …

Need For Adoption Of Koha Integrated Library Management Software In Nigerian Academic Libraries, Isaac Echezonam Anyira

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The main objective of this paper is to justify the need for Nigerian libraries which have not automated their functions to adopt of Koha ILMS as their automation software. The paper therefore examined the need for automation, the reasons for the choice of Koha ILMS and potential benefits accruable to the libraries, and functions that Koha can facilitate their perform in their libraries. The paper identified the need for automation to include need to handle information explosion, for effective management of library operations, to improve operation speed, resource sharing etc; the choice of Koha was informed by its features and …

Incorporating Digital Ethics Throughout The Software Development Process, Michael Collins, Damian Gordon, Anna Becevel, William O'Mahony

Conference papers

The media is reporting scandals associated with computer companies with increasing regularity; whether it is the misuse of user data, breach of privacy concerns, the use of biased artificial intelligence, or the problems of automated vehicles. Because of these complex issues, there is a growing need to equip computer science students with a deep appreciation of ethics, and to ensure that in the future they will develop computer systems that are ethically-based. One particularly useful strand of their education to incorporate ethics into is when teaching them about the formal approaches to developing computer systems.

There are a number of …

Essential Sentences For Navigating Stack Overflow Answers, Sarah Nadi, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stack Overflow (SO) has become an essential resource for software development. Despite its success and prevalence, navigating SO remains a challenge. Ideally, SO users could benefit from highlighted navigational cues that help them decide if an answer is relevant to their task and context. Such navigational cues could be in the form of essential sentences that help the searcher decide whether they want to read the answer or skip over it. In this paper, we compare four potential approaches for identifying essential sentences. We adopt two existing approaches and develop two new approaches based on the idea that contextual information …

Android Game, Ryan Weston

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project was to create an endless runner game for Android coded in Java and XML and developed in Android Studio. In the game, the player controls a frog that jumps from lily pad to lily pad to avoid logs moving toward the player. The player must also maneuver the lily pads as they can randomly disappear. There are three difficulties in the game that vary the disappearance rate of lily pads as well as the frequency and acceleration rate of the log obstacles. The game also has a scoring system and saves the high score locally …

Automated And Standardized Tools For Realistic, Generic Musculoskeletal Model Development, Trevor Rees Moon

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Human movement is an instinctive yet challenging task that involves complex interactions between the neuromusculoskeletal system and its interaction with the surrounding environment. One key obstacle in the understanding of human locomotion is the availability and validity of experimental data or computational models. Corresponding measurements describing the relationships of the nervous and musculoskeletal systems and their dynamics are highly variable. Likewise, computational models and musculoskeletal models in particular are vitally dependent on these measurements to define model behavior and mechanics. These measurements are often sparse and disparate due to unsystematic data collection containing variable methodologies and reporting conventions. To date, …

Automatically Categorizing Software Technologies, Mathieu Nassif, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Informal language and the absence of a standard taxonomy for software technologies make it difficult to reliably analyze technology trends on discussion forums and other on-line venues. We propose an automated approach called Witt for the categorization of software technologies (an expanded version of the hypernym discovery problem). Witt takes as input a phrase describing a software technology or concept and returns a general category that describes it (e.g., integrated development environment), along with attributes that further qualify it (commercial, php, etc.). By extension, the approach enables the dynamic creation of lists of all technologies of a given type (e.g., …

Food Scan: A Yelp For Dietary Restrictions, Andrew M. Bauer, Charlie Story, Curren Taber

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Food restrictions pose a serious issue for Chapman students, with consequences as extreme as anaphylactic shock and death. Our team started the Food Scan project with a simple goal of streamlining how individuals with dietary restrictions find safe places to eat or buy food. The project name highlights our intention to clarify restaurant menu items for users by displaying important allergen and dietary information. Using Human-Computer Interaction methods, our team chose to develop a technology that is usable, effective, enjoyable, and inclusive by involving users during the entire design process. By integrating multimodal interfaces (including speech to text inputs), we …

Twenty Years Of Open Source Software: From Skepticism To Mainstream, Gregorio Robles, Igor Steinmacher, Paul Adams, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software (OSS) has conquered the software world. You can see it nearly everywhere, from Internet infrastructure to mobile phones to the desktop. In addition to that, although many OSS practices were viewed with skepticism 20 years ago, several have become mainstream in software engineering today: from development tools such as Git to practices such as modern code reviews.

Smiler: Consistent And Usable Saliency Model Implementations, Toni Kunic, Calden Wloka, John K. Tsotsos

MODVIS Workshop

The Saliency Model Implementation Library for Experimental Research (SMILER) is a new software package which provides an open, standardized, and extensible framework for maintaining and executing computational saliency models. This work drastically reduces the human effort required to apply saliency algorithms to new tasks and datasets, while also ensuring consistency and procedural correctness for results and conclusions produced by different parties. At its launch SMILER already includes twenty three saliency models (fourteen models based in MATLAB and nine supported through containerization), and the open design of SMILER encourages this number to grow with future contributions from the community. The project …

Requirements Practices In Software Startups, John D. Hoff

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

In a dynamic environment full of uncertainties in software startups, software development practices must be carefully approached. It is vital that startups determine the right time to make advancements and evolve their company to the next level. We will discuss the importance of requirements practices in startups and their impact on company culture, work environments, and product quality.

U.S. Census Explorer: A Gui And Visualization Tool For The U.S. Census Data Api, Timothy Snyder

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

U.S. Census Explorer is a software application that is designed to provide tools for intuitive exploration and analysis of United States census data for non-technical users. The application serves as an interface into the U.S. Census Bureau’s data API that enables a complete workflow from data acquisition to data visualization without the need for technical intervention from the user. The suite of tools provided include a graphical user interface for dynamically querying U.S. census data, geographic visualizations, and the ability to download your work to common spreadsheet and image formats for inclusion in external works.

A Survey Of Software Metric Use In Research Software Development, Nasir U. Eisty, George K. Thiruvathukal, Jeffrey C. Carver

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Background: Breakthroughs in research increasingly depend on complex software libraries, tools, and applications aimed at supporting specific science, engineering, business, or humanities disciplines. The complexity and criticality of this software motivate the need for ensuring quality and reliability. Software metrics are a key tool for assessing, measuring, and understanding software quality and reliability. Aims: The goal of this work is to better understand how research software developers use traditional software engineering concepts, like metrics, to support and evaluate both the software and the software development process. One key aspect of this goal is to identify how the set of metrics …

Automating Intention Mining, Qiao Huang, Xin Xia, David Lo, Gail C. Murphy

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers frequently discuss aspects of the systems they are developing online. The comments they post to discussions form a rich information source about the system. Intention mining, a process introduced by Di Sorbo et al., classifies sentences in developer discussions to enable further analysis. As one example of use, intention mining has been used to help build various recommenders for software developers. The technique introduced by Di Sorbo et al. to categorize sentences is based on linguistic patterns derived from two projects. The limited number of data sources used in this earlier work introduces questions about the comprehensiveness of intention …

An Algorithmic Approach To Creating Effective Study Groups Using A Smart Phone App, Kelvin J. Rosado-Ayala

Honors College Theses

For many students entering college, meeting new people and studying are a common struggle. Study groups are generally recommended, especially if the groups are comprised of members with complementary personality traits. But the challenge still remains, how do freshmen or transfer students find and form these heterogeneous study groups. In order to help alleviate this issue, an Android application was developed to automatically create study groups for students. Using basic information provided by students upon registration, the algorithm is able to automatically find matching group members. The application was designed using an agile life cycle model over the course of …

Kbase: The United States Department Of Energy Systems Biology Knowledgebase, Adam P. Arkin, Robert W. Cottingham, Christopher S. Henry, Nomi L. Harris, Rick L. Stevens, Sergei Maslov, Doreen Ware, Fernando Perez, Shane Canon, Michael W. Sneddon, Matthew L. Henderson, William J. Riehl, Dan Murphy-Olson, Stephen Y. Chan, Roy T. Kamimura, Sunita Kumari, Meghan M. Drake, Thomas S. Brettin, Elizabeth M. Glass, Dylan Chivian, Dan Gunter, David J. Weston, Benjamin H. Allen, Jason Baumohl, Nathan L. Tintle

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

No abstract provided.

Using Github In Large Software Engineering Classes: An Exploratory Case Study, Miroslav Tushev

LSU Master's Theses

GitHub has been recently used in Software Engineering (SE) classes to facilitate col- laboration in student team projects. The underlying tenet is that the technical and social feature of GitHub can help students to communicate and collaborate more effectively as a team as well as help teachers to evaluate individual student contribution more objectively. To shed more light on this, in this case study, we explore the benefits and drawbacks of using GitHub in SE classes. Our study is conducted in a software engineering class of 91 students divided into 18 teams. Our research method includes an entry and an …

Vt-Revolution: Interactive Programming Video Tutorial Authoring And Watching System, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Procedural knowledge describes actions and manipulations that are carried out to complete programming tasks. An effective way to document procedural knowledge is programming video tutorials. Existing solutions to adding interactive workflow and elements to programming videos have a dilemma between the level of desired interaction and the efforts required for authoring tutorials. In this work, we tackle this dilemma by designing and building a programming video tutorial authoring system that leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming videos, and the corresponding tutorial watching system that enhances the learning experience of video tutorials …

Apibot: Question Answering Bot For Api Documentation, Yuan Tian, Ferdian Thung, Abhishek Sharma, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the carrier of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) knowledge, API documentation plays a crucial role in how developers learn and use an API. It is also a valuable information resource for answering API-related questions, especially when developers cannot find reliable answers to their questions online/offline. However, finding answers to API-related questions from API documentation might not be easy because one may have to manually go through multiple pages before reaching the relevant page, and then read and understand the information inside the relevant page to figure out the answers. To deal with this challenge, we develop APIBot, a bot that …

Automated Software Testing In The Dod: Current Practices And Opportunities For Improvement, Darryl K. Ahner, James Wisnowski, James R. Simpson

Faculty Publications

The concept of automating the testing of software-intensive systems has been around for decades, but the practice of automating testing is scarce in many industries, especially in the government defense sector. A one-year project initiated by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Scientific Test and Analysis Techniques Center of Excellence (STAT COE) and sponsored by Navy OPNAV N94 set out to:

• study the degree to which the Department of Defense (DoD) has adopted automated software testing (AST);

• share the best software practices used by industry; and

• develop and distribute an AST implementation guide intended for program management and …

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Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments, Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code fragments posted in answers on Q&A forums can form an important source of developer knowledge. However, effective reuse of code fragments found online often requires information other than the code fragment alone. We report on the results of a survey-based study to investigate to what extent developers perceive Stack Overflow code fragments to be self-explanatory. As part of the study, we also investigated the types of information missing from fragments that were not self-explanatory. We find that less than half of the Stack Overflow code fragments in our sample are considered to be self-explanatory by the 321 participants who …

On-Demand Developer Documentation, Martin P. Robillard, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Gabriele Bavota, Oscar Chaparro, Neil Ernst, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Michael Godfrey, Michele Lanza, Mario Linares-Vasquez, Gail C. Murphy, Laura Moreno, David Shepherd, Edmund Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We advocate for a paradigm shift in supporting the information needs of developers, centered around the concept of automated on-demand developer documentation. Currently, developer information needs are fulfilled by asking experts or consulting documentation. Unfortunately, traditional documentation practices are inefficient because of, among others, the manual nature of its creation and the gap between the creators and consumers. We discuss the major challenges we face in realizing such a paradigm shift, highlight existing research that can be leveraged to this end, and promote opportunities for increased convergence in research on software documentation.

Computer Vision Based Route Mapping, Ryan S. Kehlenbeck, Zachary Cody

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The problem our project solves is the integration of edge detection techniques with mapping libraries to display routes based on images. To do this, we used the OpenCV library within an Android application. This application lets a user import an image from their device, and uses edge detection to pull out a path from the image. The application can find the user's location and uses it alongside the path data from the image to create a route using the physical roads near the location. The shape of the route matches the edges from the given image and the user can …

Software Development For Home Energy Audits: Reducing Energy Consumption In Harrisonburg Through Technology, Brantley E. Gilbert

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Fossil fuels play a vital role in our daily lives. Oil, natural gas, and coal powers our cars, heats our homes and water, and are used by power companies to generate the massive amounts of electricity used every day by the United States. However, this reliance on a finite source of energy is not sustainable. Fossil fuels such as these are non-renewable resources whose production will eventually be unable to keep up with the rate of consumption. Furthermore, the extraction of the stored energy in these fuels through combustion releases harmful substances into the environment, including toxins and greenhouse gases …

Who Will Leave The Company?: A Large-Scale Industry Study Of Developer Turnover By Mining Monthly Work Report, Lingfeng Bao, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developer turnover has become a big challenge for information technology (IT) companies. The departure of key software developers might cause big loss to an IT company since they also depart with important business knowledge and critical technical skills. Understanding developer turnover is very important for IT companies to retain talented developers and reduce the loss due to developers' departure. Previous studies mainly perform qualitative observations or simple statistical analysis of developers' activity data to understand developer turnover. In this paper, we investigate whether we can predict the turnover of software developers in non-open source companies by automatically analyzing monthly …

User-Centered Design Of Multi-Gene Sequencing Panel Reports For Clinicians., Elizabeth Cutting, Meghan Banchero, Amber L. Beitelshees, James J. Cimino, Guilherme Del Fiol, Ayse P. Gurses, Mark A. Hoffman, Linda Jo Bone Jeng, Kensaku Kawamoto, Mark Kelemen, Harold Alan Pincus, Alan R. Shuldiner, Marc S. Williams, Toni I. Pollin, Casey Lynnette Overby

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

The objective of this study was to develop a high-fidelity prototype for delivering multi-gene sequencing panel (GS) reports to clinicians that simulates the user experience of a final application. The delivery and use of GS reports can occur within complex and high-paced healthcare environments. We employ a user-centered software design approach in a focus group setting in order to facilitate gathering rich contextual information from a diverse group of stakeholders potentially impacted by the delivery of GS reports relevant to two precision medicine programs at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Responses from focus group sessions were transcribed, coded and …