Software Engineering Commons^™

Finding Causally Different Tests For An Industrial Control System, Christopher M. Poskitt, Yuqi Chen, Jun Sun, Yu Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Industrial control systems (ICSs) are types of cyber-physical systems in which programs, written in languages such as ladder logic or structured text, control industrial processes through sensing and actuating. Given the use of ICSs in critical infrastructure, it is important to test their resilience against manipulations of sensor/actuator inputs. Unfortunately, existing methods fail to test them comprehensively, as they typically focus on finding the simplest-to-craft manipulations for a testing goal, and are also unable to determine when a test is simply a minor permutation of another, i.e. based on the same causal events. In this work, we propose a guided …

Socialz: Multi-Feature Social Fuzz Testing, Francisco Zanartu, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social networks have become an integral aspect of our daily lives and play a crucial role in shaping our relationships with others. However, bugs and glitches, even minor ones, can cause anything from frustrating problems to serious data leaks that can have farreaching impacts on millions of users. To mitigate these risks, fuzz testing, a method of testing with randomised inputs, can provide increased confidence in the correct functioning of a social network. However, implementing traditional fuzz testing methods can be prohibitively difficult or impractical for programmers outside of the network’s development team. To tackle this challenge, we present …

Barriers And Self-Efficacy: A Large-Scale Study On The Impact Of Oss Courses On Student Perceptions, Larissa Salerno, Simone De França Tonhão, Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open source software (OSS) development offers a unique opportunity for students in Software Engineering to experience and participate in large-scale software development, however, the impact of such courses on students’ self-efficacy and the challenges faced by students are not well understood. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing data from multiple instances of OSS development courses at universities in different countries and reporting on how students’ self-efficacy changed as a result of taking the course, as well as the barriers and challenges faced by students

Characterization And Estimation Of Musculoskeletal Pain Using Machine Learning, Boluwatife Faremi

Master's Theses

Traditional scales utilized for recording pain are known to be highly subjective and biased due to inaccuracies in recollecting actual pain intensities. As a result, machine learning (ML) models that are trained using these scores as ground truth are reported to have low performance for objective pain classification because of the huge disparity between what was felt in moments of pain and the scores recorded afterward.

In the present study, two devices were designed for gathering real-time, continuous in-session subjective pain scores and the recording of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) altered endodermal (EDA) activity. 24 participants were recruited to …

The Impact Of A Continuous Integration Service On The Delivery Time Of Merged Pull Requests, João Helis Bernardo, Daniel Alencar Da Costa, Uirá Kulesza, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice that builds and tests software frequently (e.g., at every push). One main motivator to adopt CI is the potential to deliver software functionalities more quickly than not using CI. However, there is little empirical evidence to support that CI helps projects deliver software functionalities more quickly. Through the analysis of 162,653 pull requests (PRs) of 87 GitHub projects, we empirically study whether adopting a CI service (TRAVISCI) can quicken the time to deliver merged PRs. We complement our quantitative study by analyzing 450 survey responses from participants of 73 software projects. Our …

18 Million Links In Commit Messages: Purpose, Evolution, And Decay, Tao Xiao, Sebastian Baltes, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Raula Kula, Takashi Ishio, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Commit messages contain diverse and valuable types of knowledge in all aspects of software maintenance and evolution. Links are an example of such knowledge. Previous work on “9.6 million links in source code comments” showed that links are prone to decay, become outdated, and lack bidirectional traceability. We conducted a large-scale study of 18,201,165 links from commits in 23,110 GitHub repositories to investigate whether they suffer the same fate. Results show that referencing external resources is prevalent and that the most frequent domains other than github.com are the external domains of Stack Overflow and Google Code. Similarly, links serve as …

Understanding The Role Of External Pull Requests In The Npm Ecosystem, Vittunyuta Maeprasart, Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Kenichi Matsumoto

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The risk to using third-party libraries in a software application is that much needed maintenance is solely carried out by library maintainers. These libraries may rely on a core team of maintainers (who might be a single maintainer that is unpaid and overworked) to serve a massive client user-base. On the other hand, being open source has the benefit of receiving contributions (in the form of External PRs) to help fix bugs and add new features. In this paper, we investigate the role by which External PRs (contributions from outside the core team of maintainers) contribute to a library. Through …

Social Troubleshooting Workshops: Upskilling Students' Soft And Self-Reflection Skills, Sandra Schulz, Rita Garcia, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This poster focuses on workshops to support students’ soft and selfreflection skills during collaborative learning. These workshops intend to help reduce anxiety during group work and to promote inclusive and equitable collaborative learning environments. Unfortunately, single-paced instructional approaches are typically applied in learning environments [3] and do not consider students’ needs when learning nor provide soft-skills guidance that encourages equal participation. The workshops offer educator and student support for equitable group work through upskilling students’ soft skills, such as leadership and communication, that promote better teamwork. By assisting students in developing and practising soft and self-reflection skills, they might have …

Testing Automated Driving Systems By Breaking Many Laws Efficiently, Xiaodong Zhang, Wei Zhao, Yang Sun, Jun Sun, Yulong Shen, Xuewen Dong, Zijiang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An automated driving system (ADS), as the brain of an autonomous vehicle (AV), should be tested thoroughly ahead of deployment. ADS must satisfy a complex set of rules to ensure road safety, e.g., the existing traffic laws and possibly future laws that are dedicated to AVs. To comprehensively test an ADS, we would like to systematically discover diverse scenarios in which certain traffic law is violated. The challenge is that (1) there are many traffic laws (e.g., 13 testable articles in Chinese traffic laws and 16 testable articles in Singapore traffic laws, with 81 and 43 violation situations respectively); and …

Qebverif: Quantization Error Bound Verification Of Neural Networks, Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To alleviate the practical constraints for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge devices, quantization is widely regarded as one promising technique. It reduces the resource requirements for computational power and storage space by quantizing the weights and/or activation tensors of a DNN into lower bit-width fixed-point numbers, resulting in quantized neural networks (QNNs). While it has been empirically shown to introduce minor accuracy loss, critical verified properties of a DNN might become invalid once quantized. Existing verification methods focus on either individual neural networks (DNNs or QNNs) or quantization error bound for partial quantization. In this work, we propose …

Duplicate Bug Report Detection: How Far Are We?, Ting Zhang, Donggyun Han, Venkatesh Vinayakarao, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Bowen Xu, Thung Ferdian, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many Duplicate Bug Report Detection (DBRD) techniques have been proposed in the research literature. The industry uses some other techniques. Unfortunately, there is insufficient comparison among them, and it is unclear how far we have been. This work fills this gap by comparing the aforementioned techniques. To compare them, we first need a benchmark that can estimate how a tool would perform if applied in a realistic setting today. Thus, we first investigated potential biases that affect the fair comparison of the accuracy of DBRD techniques. Our experiments suggest that data age and issue tracking system choice cause a significant …

Job Management Portal Software Review, Ruchir Elukurthy

University Honors Theses

This essay provides an overview of a computer science capstone project focused on developing a website for Abilities At Work, a non-profit organization. The website aims to assist employment specialists in managing clients' information and tracking their job application in finding meaningful employment. The essay highlights the various stages of the project, understanding requirements, selecting tools and technologies, creating an application architecture, and writing code. Also, this essay focuses on the challenges encountered during the project, along with the valuable lessons learned. This essay emphasizes how the project closely resembles real-world software development, offering insights for prospective students and professionals. …

Wasm-Pbchunk: Incrementally Developing A Racket-To-Wasm Compiler Using Partial Bytecode Compilation, Adam C. Perlin

Master's Theses

Racket is a modern, general-purpose programming language with a language-oriented focus. To date, Racket has found notable uses in research and education, among other applications. To expand the reach of the language, there has been a desire to develop an efficient platform for running Racket in a web-based environment. WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary executable format for a stack-based virtual machine designed to provide a fast, efficient, and secure execution environment for code on the web. Wasm is primarily intended to be a compiler target for higher-level languages. Providing Wasm support for the Racket project may be a promising way …

Transformation And Abstraction To Aid Comparison Of Binary Executables Across Compilation Environments, Jeremy D. Seideman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Binary analysis allows researchers to examine how programs are constructed and how they will impact an underlying system. The various analysis techniques allow the determination of code authorship, reuse, and similarity. Detecting code reuse is significant because code reuse can be a method for vulnerabilities and security issues to spread among software projects. In this work, we examine techniques that can aid in binary analysis, especially those that abstract and transform binaries, so that they can be compared across compilation environments, including possible changes in compiler version, hardware architecture, and compilation options. Historically, this has been difficult to accomplish since …

Invalidator: Automated Patch Correctness Assessment Via Semantic And Syntactic Reasoning, Tranh Le-Cong, Duc Minh Luong, Xuan Bach D. Le, David Lo, Nhat-Hoa Tran, Bui Quang-Huy, Quyet-Thang Huynh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated program repair (APR) has been gaining ground recently. However, a significant challenge that still remains is test overfitting, in which APR-generated patches plausibly pass the validation test suite but fail to generalize. A common practice to assess the correctness of APR-generated patches is to judge whether they are equivalent to ground truth, i.e., developer-written patches, by either generating additional test cases or employing human manual inspections. The former often requires the generation of at least one test that shows behavioral differences between the APR-patched and developer-patched programs. Searching for this test, however, can be difficult as the search space …

Blockchain-Enabled Ehr Sharing In Healthcare Federation: Sharding And Interblockchain Communication, Faiza Hashim

Dissertations

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are crucial components of the healthcare system, facilitating accurate and efficient diagnosis. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution to improve EHRs sharing among medical practitioners while ensuring privacy and security. By leveraging its decentralized, distributed, immutable, and secure architecture, blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the healthcare system. However, due to security concerns, blockchain networks in healthcare typically operate in private or consortium modes, resulting in isolated networks within a federation. Scalability remains a significant challenge for blockchain networks, as the number of participating nodes increases within each network of the federation. Consensus mechanisms …

Ocapo: Occupancy-Aware, Pdc Control For Open-Plan, Shared Workspaces, Anaradha Ravi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passive Displacement Cooling (PDC) has gained popularity as a means of significantly reducing building energy consumption overheads, especially in tropical climates. PDC eliminates the use of mechanical fans, instead using chilled-water heat exchangers to perform convective cooling. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of different parameters affecting occupant comfort in a 1000m2 open-floor area (consisting of multiple zones) of a ZEB (Zero Energy Building) deployed with PDC units and tackle the problem of setting the temperature setpoint of the PDC units to assure occupant thermal comfort. We tackle two key practical challenges: (a) the zone-level (i.e., occupant-experienced) temperature differs …

Scanet: Self-Paced Semi-Curricular Attention Network For Non-Homogeneous Image Dehazing, Yu Guo, Yuan Gao, Ryan Wen Liu, Yuxu Lu, Jingxiang Qu, Shengfeng He, Ren Wenqi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The presence of non-homogeneous haze can cause scene blurring, color distortion, low contrast, and other degradations that obscure texture details. Existing homogeneous dehazing methods struggle to handle the non-uniform distribution of haze in a robust manner. The crucial challenge of non-homogeneous dehazing is to effectively extract the non-uniform distribution features and reconstruct the details of hazy areas with high quality. In this paper, we propose a novel self-paced semi-curricular attention network, called SCANet, for non-homogeneous image dehazing that focuses on enhancing haze-occluded regions. Our approach consists of an attention generator network and a scene re-construction network. We use the luminance …

Stream-Evolving Bot Detection Framework Using Graph-Based And Feature-Based Approaches For Identifying Social Bots On Twitter, Eiman Alothali

Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the problem of evolving social bots in online social networks, particularly Twitter. Such accounts spread misinformation and inflate social network content to mislead the masses. The main objective of this dissertation is to propose a stream-based evolving bot detection framework (SEBD), which was constructed using both graph- and feature-based models. It was built using Python, a real-time streaming engine (Apache Kafka version 3.2), and our pretrained model (bot multi-view graph attention network (Bot-MGAT)). The feature-based model was used to identify predictive features for bot detection and evaluate the SEBD predictions. The graph-based model was used to …

Mapping Programs To Equations, Hessamaldin Mohammadi

Dissertations

Extracting the function of a program from a static analysis of its source code is a valuable capability in software engineering; at a time when there is increasing talk of using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to generate software from natural language specifications, it becomes increasingly important to determine the exact function of software as written, to figure out what AI has understood the natural language specification to mean. For all its criticality, the ability to derive the domain-to-range function of a program has proved to be an elusive goal, due primarily to the difficulty of deriving the function of iterative statements. …