Software Engineering Commons^™

Specgen: Automated Generation Of Formal Program Specifications Via Large Language Models, Lezhi Ma, Shangqing Liu, Yi Li, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the software development process, formal program specifications play a crucial role in various stages, including requirement analysis, software testing, and verification. However, manually crafting formal program specifications is rather difficult, making the job time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, it is even more challenging to write specifications that correctly and comprehensively describe the semantics of complex programs. To reduce the burden on software developers, automated specification generation methods have emerged. However, existing methods usually rely on predefined templates or grammar, making them struggle to accurately describe the behavior and functionality of complex real-world programs. To tackle this challenge, we introduce SpecGen, …

Building Bridges Across Papua New Guinea’S Digital Divide In Growing The Ict Industry, Marc Cheong, Sankwi Abuzo, Hideaki Hata, Priscilla Kevin, Winifred Kula, Benson Mirou, Christoph Treude, Dong Wang, Raula Gaikovina Kula

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an emerging tech society with an opportunity to overcome geographic and social boundaries, in order to engage with the global market. However, the current tech landscape, dominated by Big Tech in Silicon Valley and other multinational companies in the Global North, tends to overlook the requirements of emerging economies such as PNG. This is becoming more obvious as issues such as algorithmic bias (in tech product deployments) and the digital divide (as in the case of non-affordable commercial software) are affecting PNG users. The Open Source Software (OSS) movement, based on extant research, is seen …

Flexfl: Flexible And Effective Fault Localization With Open-Source Large Language Models, Chuyang Xu, Zhongxin Liu, Xiaoxue Ren, Gehao Zhang, Ming Liang, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fault localization (FL) targets identifying bug locations within a software system, which can enhance debugging efficiency and improve software quality. Due to the impressive code comprehension ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), a few studies have proposed to leverage LLMs to locate bugs, i.e., LLM-based FL, and demonstrated promising performance. However, first, these methods are limited in flexibility. They rely on bug-triggering test cases to perform FL and cannot make use of other available bug-related information, e.g., bug reports. Second, they are built upon proprietary LLMs, which are, although powerful, confronted with risks in data privacy. To address these limitations, …

Real-Time Rectifying Flight Control Misconfiguration Using Intelligent Agent, Ruidong Han, Shangzhi Xu, Juanru Li, Elisa Bertino, David Lo, Jianfeng Ma, Siqi Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Configurations are supported by most flight control systems, allowing users to control a flying drone adapted to complexities such as environmental changes or mission alterations. Such an advanced functionality also introduces a significant problem—misconfiguration settings. It may cause drone instability, threaten drone safety, and potentially lead to substantial financial loss. However, detecting and rectifying misconfigurations across different flight control systems is challenging because (1) (mis)configuration-related code snippets might be syntactically correct and thus hard to identify through traditional code analysis; (2) the response to each configuration varies under different flying scenarios.In this article, we propose and implement a novel rectification …

Toward Better Comprehension Of Breaking Changes In The Npm Ecosystem, Dezhen Kong, Jiakun Liu, Lingfeng Bao, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code evolution is prevalent in software ecosystems, which can provide many benefits, such as new features, bug fixes, security patches, while still introducing breaking changes that make downstream projects fail to work. Breaking changes cause a lot of effort to both downstream and upstream developers: downstream developers need to adapt to breaking changes and upstream developers are responsible for identifying and documenting them. In the NPM ecosystem, characterized by frequent code changes and a high tolerance for making breaking changes, the effort is larger.For better comprehension of breaking changes in the NPM ecosystem and to enhance breaking change detection tools, …

Improving Home Security Through User Centered Device Positioning, Lalith Nadipalli

Theses and Dissertations

In today’s world, where technology is advancing rapidly and security threats are becoming more complex, the need for effective home safety measures is more critical than ever. Homeowners are increasingly turning to a variety of smart devices, such as smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and security cameras, to protect their living spaces against potential dangers like burglary, fire, and environmental hazards. These devices offer essential protection, acting as both early warning systems and visual surveillance tools. However, their effectiveness largely hinges on how well they are placed within the home. Proper placement of these safety devices ensures that they provide …

Learning Through Online Participation: From Breakout Rooms To Discord, Makayla Moster

All Dissertations

For software development teams, teamwork is an essential part of their day-to-day lives. However, due to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, more companies have allowed employees to have more hybrid and remote work options than before. As more companies are adopting hybrid and remote workstyles, we need to ensure that we are preparing the next batch of young software developers to conduct teamwork in remote and hybrid settings. In this dissertation, I address the tools students use for teamwork and how to improve their teamwork inside and outside of the classroom. I present my research on improving student experiences …

Exploring The Pedagogical Impact Of Software Development Live Streams: Informal Learning Opportunities For Software And Game Developers, Ella Kokinda

All Dissertations

Live streaming is an increasingly popular medium for throwing back the curtain on software development where streamers and viewers share their knowledge and experiences. Popular platforms like Twitch and YouTube enable developers to stream live coding sessions where people around the world can engage in real-time collaboration, feedback, knowledge sharing, and skill development. This work investigates the pedagogical implications and learning opportunities present in software and game development live streaming while focusing on the role of streaming as a learning environment and collaborative community. We begin by exploring summer camps as an informal learning opportunity for STEM education, highlighting the …

“I Can Run At Night!”: Using Augmented Reality To Support Nighttime Guided Running For Low-Vision Runners, Yuki Abe, Keisuke Matsushima, Kotaro Hara, Daisuke Sakamoto, Tetsuo Ono

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dark environment challenges low-vision (LV) individuals to engage in running by following sighted guide—a Caller-style guided running—due to insufficient illumination, because it prevents them from using their residual vision to follow the guide and be aware about their environment. We design, develop, and evaluate RunSight, an augmented reality (AR)-based assistive tool to support LV individuals to run at night. RunSight combines see-through HMD and image processing to enhance one’s visual awareness of the surrounding environment (e.g., potential hazard) and visualize the guide’s position with AR-based visualization. To demonstrate RunSight’s efficacy, we conducted a user study with 8 LV runners. The …

Fixdrive: Automatically Repairing Autonomous Vehicle Driving Behaviour For $0.08 Per Violation, Yang Sun, Christopher M. Poskitt, Kun Wang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are advancing rapidly, with Level-4 AVs already operating in real-world conditions. Current AVs, however, still lag behind human drivers in adaptability and performance, often exhibiting overly conservative behaviours and occasionally violating traffic laws. Existing solutions, such as runtime enforcement, mitigate this by automatically repairing the AV's planned trajectory at runtime, but such approaches lack transparency and should be a measure of last resort. It would be preferable for AV repairs to generalise beyond specific incidents and to be interpretable for users. In this work, we propose FixDrive, a framework that analyses driving records from near-misses or law …

Intention Is All You Need: Refining Your Code From Your Intention, Qi Guo, Xiaofei Xie, Shangqing Liu, Ming Hu, Xiaohong Li, Lei Bu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code refinement aims to enhance existing code by addressing issues, refactoring, and optimizing to improve quality and meet specific requirements. As software projects scale in size and complexity, the traditional iterative exchange between reviewers and developers becomes increasingly burdensome. While recent deep learning techniques have been explored to accelerate this process, their performance remains limited, primarily due to challenges in accurately understanding reviewers’ intents. This paper proposes an intention-based code refinement technique that enhances the conventional comment-to-code process by explicitly extracting reviewer intentions from the comments. Our approach consists of two key phases: Intention Extraction and Intention Guided Revision Generation. …

Scenario-Driven And Context-Aware Automated Accessibility Testing For Android Apps, Yuxin Zhang, Sen Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Zibo Liu, Lingling Fan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile accessibility is increasingly important nowadays as it enables people with disabilities to use mobile applications to perform daily tasks. Ensuring mobile accessibility not only benefits those with disabilities but also enhances the user experience for all users, making applications more intuitive and user-friendly. Although numerous tools are available for testing and detecting accessibility issues in Android applications, a large number of false negatives and false positives persist due to limitations in the existing approaches, i.e., low coverage of UI scenarios and lack of consideration of runtime context. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a scenario-driven exploration …

Dissecting Global Search: A Simple Yet Effective Method To Boost Individual Discrimination Testing And Repair, Lili Quan, Tianlin Li, Xiaofei Xie, Zhenpeng Chen, Sen Chen, Lingxiao Jiang, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep Learning (DL) has achieved significant success in socially critical decision-making applications but often exhibits unfair behaviors, raising social concerns. Among these unfair behaviors, individual discrimination-examining inequalities between instance pairs with identical profiles differing only in sensitive attributes such as gender, race, and age-is extremely socially impactful. Existing methods have made significant and commendable efforts in testing individual discrimination before deployment. However, their efficiency and effectiveness remain limited, particularly when evaluating relatively fairer models. It remains unclear which phase of the existing testing framework (global or local) is the primary bottleneck limiting performance. Facing the above issues, we first identify …

Development Of Fuzzy Ontology For Explainable Artificial Intelligence For Decision-Making In Fuzzy Environment, Pavel Kosov

Chemical Technology, Control and Management

In modern artificial intelligence systems, there is an acute need to understand the decision-making logic of "black box" algorithms. Our research proposes an innovative method for increasing the transparency of such systems through the formalization of fuzzy explanatory mechanisms. We have developed an extension of existing ontological approaches by introducing the concept of fuzziness into the structure of explanatory properties, which allows overcoming the fundamental limitations of traditional XAI methods. The proposed formalization is based on the theory of collective mental models and principles of fuzzy logic, providing a more accurate reflection of uncertainty and subjectivity in expert knowledge. Our …

Cascading Effects: Analyzing Project Failure Impact In The Maven Central Ecosystem, Mina Shehata

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Abstract—This study examines failure propagation patterns within the Maven Central ecosystem, a critical software de- pendency repository, through comprehensive analysis of dependency networks using the Goblin framework. Our dual-sampling methodology, investigating both top dependencies and random libraries, revealed two distinct failure propagation patterns that pose significant risks to ecosystem stability. Core infrastructure failures, particularly evident in cases like the AWS SDK family with 429,800 total dependencies, create immediate and widespread disruption, affecting an average of 20,402 dependent projects and propagating through dependency chains averaging 90.80 levels deep.

Our analysis of peripheral projects reveals their significant cascading effects, with higher average …

Simplifying 3d Printing Using Natural Language Processing, Jared E. Rosenberger

Undergraduate Theses

3D printing is a crucial technology with many applications in different fields. To be able to use this technology to its full extent, expertise in computer aided design (CAD) technology and 3D modeling is required. Many people interested in 3D printing do not have this expertise and thus cannot build custom models, and are consequently forced to buy them instead. Natural language processing (NLP) is one tool that can vastly simplify 3D modeling for those lacking CAD experience. Using NLP, someone can simply dictate what they want to be able to print, and a computer can then build a 3D …

Towards Testing, Detecting, And Debloating Insecure Components In Android Applications, Zicheng Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The Android ecosystem’s openness and extensibility have fueled its dominance in the mobile market, but they also broaden the attack surface of applications by introducing insecure or redundant methods. Vulnerabilities arise from various sources, including insecure API usage, code cloning, and feature bloat, especially from unneeded components introduced during development. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents a systematic, three-phase pipeline that transitions seamlessly from vulnerability discovery to clone-based detection and, ultimately, to dynamic mitigation through runtime debloating. Each phase builds upon the insights and limitations of the previous, collectively forming a practical approach to improving Android app security.

In …

The Use Of Call Graphs And Deep Learning To Improve Software Testing, Ziad A. Al-Sharif, Hemanth G. Chintala, Safwan Omari

Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences Faculty Conferences

Software testing is a critical part of software development, it is essential for preventing failures and enhancing software quality attributes. However, the testing process can be costly and time-consuming, often involving a large number of test cases. Over time, the accumulation of redundant and overlapping test cases can complicate and lengthen the testing time. To address these challenges, this paper utilizes graph similarity and deep learning techniques to optimize test suites. It uses call graphs from test cases to identify redundant and similar test cases. A machine learning model is used to calculate and predict the similarity scores between these …

A Study Of Preconditions And Postconditions As Design Constraints For Llm Code Generation, Luke Newcomb

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced automated code generation, but current methods predominantly rely on natural language descriptions. This approach encounters challenges when handling complex, class-level software generation tasks due to inherent ambiguity and under-specification. Few studies have investigated how more formal software engineering constraints, such as explicit preconditions and postconditions, influence class-level generation tasks. This work addresses this gap through a structured evaluation of six state-of-the-art LLMs generating software implementations from systematically designed class-level specifications. Results demonstrate that incorporating explicit design constraints significantly boosts initial generation accuracy (measured via the pass@k metric), particularly in Python but also in …

Advancing Devsecops In Smes: Challenges And Best Practices For Secure Ci/Cd Pipelines, Jayaprakashreddy Cheenepalli, John Hastings, Khandaker Mamun Ahmed, Chad Fenner

Research & Publications

This study evaluates the adoption of DevSecOps among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), identifying key challenges, best practices, and future trends. Through a mixed methods approach backed by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory, we analyzed survey data from 405 SME professionals, revealing that while 68% have implemented DevSecOps, adoption is hindered by technical complexity (41%), resource constraints (35%), and cultural resistance (38%). Despite strong leadership prioritization of security (73%), automation gaps persist, with only 12% of organizations conducting security scans per commit. Our findings highlight a growing integration of security tools, particularly API security …