Software Engineering Commons^™

Developer Involvement Considered Harmful? An Empirical Examination Of Android Bug Resolution Times, Subhajit Datta, Proshanta Sarkar, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In large scale software development ecosystems, there is a common perception that higher developer involvement leads to faster resolution of bugs. This is based on conjectures around more ``eyeballs" making bugs "shallow" -- whose validity and applicability are not without dispute. In this paper, we posit that the level of developer attention as well as its extent of diversity influence how quickly bugs get resolved. We report results from a study of 1,000+ Android bugs. We find statistically significant evidence that attention and diversity have contrasting relationships with the resolution time of bugs, even after controlling for factors such as …

An Ecological Model For Digital Platforms Maintenance And Evolution, Paolo Rocchi, Paolo Spagnoletti, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The maintenance of software products has been studied extensively in both software engineering and management information systems. Such studies are mainly focused on the activities that take place prior to starting the maintenance phase. Their contribution is either related to the improvement of software quality or to validating contingency models for reducing maintenance efforts. The continuous maintenance philosophy suggests to shift the attention within the maintenance phase for better coping with the evolutionary trajectories of digital platforms. In this paper, we examine the maintenance process of a digital platform from the perspective of the software vendor. Based on our empirical …

Rapid: A Toolkit For Reliability Analysis Of Non-Deterministic Systems, Lin Gui, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Truong Khanh Nguyen, Jin Song Dong Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Non-determinism in concurrent or distributed software systems (i.e., various possible execution orders among different distributed components) presents new challenges to the existing reliability analysis methods based on Markov chains. In this work, we present a toolkit RaPiD for the reliability analysis of non-deterministic systems. Taking Markov decision process as reliability model, RaPiD can help in the analysis of three fundamental and rewarding aspects regarding software reliability. First, to have reliability assurance on a system, RaPiD can synthesize the overall system reliability given the reliability values of system components. Second, given a requirement on the overall system reliability, RaPiD can distribute …

Client/Server Data Synchronization In Ios Development, Dmitry Tumanov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Electronic gadgets such as touchpads and smartphones are becoming more popular in business and everyday life. The main advantage of mobile devices over personal computers is their portability. Cellular data plans allow Internet access without having permanent access point. There is a number of web-based applications available for gadgets. The primary goal of these apps is to provide their services through constant Internet access. However, it may affect the operation of both devices and applications. The objective of this thesis is to find a better way of client/server data synchronization in iOS development that can reduce the negative consequences of …

Buglocalizer: Integrated Tool Support For Bug Localization, Ferdian Thung, Tien-Duy B. Le, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To manage bugs that appear in a software, developers often make use of a bug tracking system such as Bugzilla. Users can report bugs that they encounter in such a system. Whenever a user reports a new bug report, developers need to read the summary and description of the bug report and manually locate the buggy files based on this information. This manual process is often time consuming and tedious. Thus, a number of past studies have proposed bug localization techniques to automatically recover potentially buggy files from bug reports. Unfortunately, none of these techniques are integrated to bug tracking …

Traccs: Trajectory-Aware Coordinated Urban Crowd-Sourcing, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Aldy Gunawan, Archan Misra, Koustuv Dasgupta, Deepthi Chander

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the problem of large-scale mobile crowd-tasking, where a large pool of citizen crowd-workers are used to perform a variety of location-specific urban logistics tasks. Current approaches to such mobile crowd-tasking are very decentralized: a crowd-tasking platform usually provides each worker a set of available tasks close to the worker's current location; each worker then independently chooses which tasks she wants to accept and perform. In contrast, we propose TRACCS, a more coordinated task assignment approach, where the crowd-tasking platform assigns a sequence of tasks to each worker, taking into account their expected location trajectory over a wider time …

Predicting Effectiveness Of Ir-Based Bug Localization Techniques, Tien-Duy B. Le, Ferdian Thung, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, many information retrieval (IR) based bug localization approaches have been proposed in the literature. These approaches use information retrieval techniques to process a textual bug report and a collection of source code files to find buggy files. They output a ranked list of files sorted by their likelihood to contain the bug. Recent approaches can achieve reasonable accuracy, however, even a state-of-the-art bug localization tool outputs many ranked lists where buggy files appear very low in the lists. This potentially causes developers to distrust bug localization tools. Parnin and Orso recently conduct a user study and highlight that developers …

Band Selection For Hyperspectral Images Using Probabilistic Memetic Algorithm, Liang Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Meng-Hiot Lim, Si Wei Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Band selection plays an important role in identifying the most useful and valuable information contained in the hyperspectral images for further data analysis such as classification, clustering, etc. Memetic algorithm (MA), among other metaheuristic search methods, has been shown to achieve competitive performances in solving the NP-hard band selection problem. In this paper, we propose a formal probabilistic memetic algorithm for band selection, which is able to adaptively control the degree of global exploration against local exploitation as the search progresses. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed probabilistic mechanism, empirical studies conducted on five well-known hyperspectral images against two …

K-Sketch: Digital Storytelling With Animation Sketches, Richard Christopher Davis, Nur Camellia Binte Zakaria

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

K-Sketch gives novice animators an easy way to tell stories with animation sketches. It relies on users’ intuitive sense of space and time, and makes animation easy through the use of sketching and demonstration. Our studies have shown that people take naturally to telling stories with K-Sketch, and it is particularly helpful for exploring the timing of events. We also found that K-Sketch is a good collaborative medium for telling stories. In this demonstration we will show how K-Sketch works and explain how these advantages are realized in practice.

Vector Abstraction And Concretization For Scalable Detection Of Refactorings, Narcisa Andreea Milea, Lingxiao Jiang, Siau-Cheng Khoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated techniques have been proposed to either identify refactoring opportunities (i.e., code fragments that can be but have not yet been restructured in a program), or reconstruct historical refactorings (i.e., code restructuring operations that have happened between different versions of a program). In this paper, we propose a new technique that can detect both refactoring opportunities and historical refactorings in large code bases. The key of our technique is the design of vector abstraction and concretization operations that can encode code changes induced by certain refactorings as characteristic vectors. Thus, the problem of identifying refactorings can be reduced to the …

Grumon: Fast And Accurate Group Monitoring For Heterogeneous Urban Spaces, Rijurekha Sen, Youngki Lee, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time monitoring of groups and their rich contexts will be a key building block for futuristic, group-aware mobile services. In this paper, we propose GruMon, a fast and accurate group monitoring system for dense and complex urban spaces. GruMon meets the performance criteria of precise group detection at low latencies by overcoming two critical challenges of practical urban spaces, namely (a) the high density of crowds, and (b) the imprecise location information available indoors. Using a host of novel features extracted from commodity smartphone sensors, GruMon can detect over 80% of the groups, with 97% precision, using 10 minutes latency …

Cama: Efficient Modeling Of The Capture Effect For Low Power Wireless Networks, Behnam Dezfouli, Marjan Radi, Kamin Whitehouse, Shukor Abd Razak, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network simulation is an essential tool for the design and evaluation of wireless network protocols, and realistic channel modeling is essential for meaningful analysis. Recently, several network protocols have demonstrated substantial network performance improvements by exploiting the capture effect, but existing models of the capture effect are still not adequate for protocol simulation and analysis. Physical-level models that calculate the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for every incoming bit are too slow to be used for large-scale or long-term networking experiments, and link-level models such as those currently used by the NS2 simulator do not accurately predict protocol performance. In this article, …

Taming The Software Chaos: True To Its Promise, Iftdss Eases The Burden Of Fuels Treatment Planning—And Does A Lot More Besides, Gail Wells

Joint Fire Science Program Digests

A key problem reported by the fuels treatment planning community is the difficulty and inefficiency of evaluating and then applying many planning tools and applications. Fuels specialists have struggled to find, load, and learn all the different fuels and fire planning models, not to mention the interface of running, adjusting, and inputting data specific to each model without the ability to easily share inputs/outputs between models.

The Interagency Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) was conceived as a way for users to learn one interface, access a variety of data and models all in one place, and pass data (inputs …

Survey On Wakeup Scheduling For Environmentally-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Wee-Seng Soh, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in energy harvesting technologies and ultra low-power computing and communication devices are enabling the realization of environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (EPWSNs). Because of limited and dynamic energy supply, EPWSNs are duty-cycled to achieve energy-neutrality, a condition where the energy demand does not exceed the energy supply. Duty cycling entails nodes to sleep and wakeup according to a wakeup scheduling scheme. In this paper, we survey the various wakeup scheduling schemes, with focus on their suitability for EPWSNs. A classification scheme is proposed to characterize existing wakeup scheduling schemes, with three main categories, namely, asynchronous, synchronous, and …

Designing An Immersive And Entertaining Pervasive Gameplay Experience With Spheros As Game And Interface Elements, Brennan Jones, Kody Dillman, Setareh Aghel Manesh, Ehud Sharlin, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Sphero is a robotic remote-controlled ball capable of rolling around on its own in any direction at multiple speeds. Numerous games have been designed for the Sphero for smartphones and tablets. However, most of these games provide an interface for controlling the Sphero that is far from natural. These games also do not put a strong focus on the physical environment around the Sphero. This work discusses a control scheme used to control a Sphero with another Sphero, and a pervasive game leveraging this scheme that emphasizes physical properties of the environment to create an immersive experience.

Action Classification By Exploring Directional Co-Occurrence Of Weighted Stips, Mengyuan Liu, Hong Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human action recognition is challenging mainly due to intro-variety, inter-ambiguity and clutter backgrounds in real videos. Bag-of-visual words model utilizes spatio-temporal interest points(STIPs), and represents action by the distribution of points which ignores visual context among points. To add more contextual information, we propose a method by encoding spatio-temporal distribution of weighted pairwise points. First, STIPs are extracted from an action sequence and clustered into visual words. Then, each word is weighted in both temporal and spatial domains to capture the relationships with other words. Finally, the directional relationships between co-occurrence pairwise words are used to encode visual contexts. We …

Compositional Vector Space Models For Improved Bug Localization, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Julia Lawall

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software developers and maintainers often need to locate code units responsible for a particular bug. A number of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been proposed to map natural language bug descriptions to the associated code units. The vector space model (VSM) with the standard tf-idf weighting scheme (VSMnatural), has been shown to outperform nine other state-of-the-art IR techniques. However, there are multiple VSM variants with different weighting schemes, and their relative performance differs for different software systems. Based on this observation, we propose to compose various VSM variants, modelling their composition as an optimization problem. We propose a genetic algorithm …

Dynamic Inference Of Change Contracts, Tien-Duy B. Le, Jooyong Yi, David Lo, Ferdian Thung, Abhik Roychoudhury

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software evolves and thus developers frequently make changes to systems that are logged in version control systems. These changes are often poorly documented -- often commit logs are empty or only contain minimal information. Thus, it is often a challenge to understand why certain changes are made especially if they were introduced many months or even years ago. Understanding these changes is important when pertinent questions are raised during future bug fixing or software evolution efforts. Thus, there is a need for an automated approach that can help developers better document changes with little or minimal effort. To address this …

Enabling National Software Development Competitions To Identify And Enhance Student Mentor Capability In Singapore, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The authors previously developed a system to facilitate the self-directed learning and practicing of software languages in Singapore. One of the goals of this self-directed learning was to enable the creation of student mentors who would be able to assist other students during classroom sessions. Building on this work, the authors extended the platform to support the promotion and coordination of multiple programming competitions including multiple schools systems within Singapore with the goals of identifying, enabling, and mentoring students who might be better prepared to mentor their peers at their school after participating in the country wide competition. This paper …

Hippi Care Hospital: Towards Proactive Business Processes In Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It was 2.35 am on a Saturday morning. Wiki Lim, process specialist from the Process Innovation Centre (PIC) of Hippi Care Hospital (HCH), desperately doodling on her notepad for ideas to improve service delivery at HCH’s Emergency Department (ED). HCH has committed to the public that its ED would meet the service quality criterion of serving 90% of A3 and A4 patients, non-emergency patients with moderate to mild symptoms, within 90 minutes of their arrival at the ED. The ED was not able to meet this performance goal and Dr. Edward Kim, the head of the ED at HCH, had …