Software Engineering Commons^™

Message From The Chairs: Techdebt 2023, Christoph Treude, Yuanfang Cai, Xin Xia, Zadia Codabux, Hideaki Hata, Florian Deissenboeck, Rodrigo Spinola

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Welcome to the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt, TechDebt 2023, co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2023, in the beautiful city of Melbourne, Australia. After several years of virtual and hybrid conferences, TechDebt 2023 marks the first predominantly in-person edition of the conference series since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Navigating Complexity In Software Engineering: A Prototype For Comparing Gpt-N Solutions, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Navigating the diverse solution spaces of non-trivial software engineering tasks requires a combination of technical knowledge, problem-solving skills, and creativity. With multiple possible solutions available, each with its own set of trade-offs, it is essential for programmers to evaluate the various options and select the one that best suits the specific requirements and constraints of a project. Whether it is choosing from a range of libraries, weighing the pros and cons of different architecture and design solutions, or finding unique ways to fulfill user requirements, the ability to think creatively is crucial for making informed decisions that will result in …

What's Behind Tight Deadlines? Business Causes Of Technical Debt, Rodrigo Rebouças De Almeida, Christoph Treude, Uirá Kulesza

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

What are the business causes behind tight deadlines? What drives the prioritization of features that pushes quality matters to the back burner? We conducted a survey with 71 experienced practitioners and did a thematic analysis of the openended answers to the question: “Could you give examples of how business may contribute to technical debt?” Business-related causes were organized into two categories: pure-business and business/IT gap, and they were related to ‘tight deadlines’ and ‘features over quality’, the most frequently cited management reasons for technical debt. We contribute a cause-effect model which relates the various business causes of tight deadlines and …

She Elicits Requirements And He Tests: Software Engineering Gender Bias In Large Language Models, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Implicit gender bias in software development is a well-documented issue, such as the association of technical roles with men. To address this bias, it is important to understand it in more detail. This study uses data mining techniques to investigate the extent to which 56 tasks related to software development, such as assigning GitHub issues and testing, are affected by implicit gender bias embedded in large language models. We systematically translated each task from English into a genderless language and back, and investigated the pronouns associated with each task. Based on translating each task 100 times in different permutations, we …

Towards Understanding The Open Source Interest In Gender-Related Github Projects, Rita Garcia, Christoph Treude, Wendy La

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The open-source community uses the GitHub platform to exchange and share software applications and services of interest. This paper aims to identify the open-source community’s interest in gender-related projects on GitHub. Our findings create research opportunities and identify resources by the open-source community that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. We use data mining to identify GitHub projects that focus on gender-related topics. We apply quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the projects’ attributes and to classify them within a gender social structure and a gender bias taxonomy. We aim to understand the open-source community’s efforts and interests in gender topics …

Understanding The Role Of Images On Stack Overflow, Dong Wang, Tao Xiao, Christoph Treude, Raula Kula, Hideaki Hata, Yasutaka Kamei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Images are increasingly being shared by software developers in diverse channels including question-and-answer forums like Stack Overflow. Although prior work has pointed out that these images are meaningful and provide complementary information compared to their associated text, how images are used to support questions is empirically unknown. To address this knowledge gap, in this paper we specifically conduct an empirical study to investigate (I) the characteristics of images, (II) the extent to which images are used in different question types, and (III) the role of images on receiving answers. Our results first show that user interface is the most common …

Semparser: A Semantic Parser For Log Analytics, Yintong Huo, Yuxin Su, Cheryl Lee, R. Michael Lyu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Logs, being run-time information automatically generated by software, record system events and activities with their timestamps. Before obtaining more insights into the run-time status of the software, a fundamental step of log analysis, called log parsing, is employed to extract structured templates and parameters from the semi-structured raw log messages. However, current log parsers are all syntax-based and regard each message as a character string, ignoring the semantic information included in parameters and templates.Thus, we propose the first semantic-based parser SemParser to unlock the critical bottleneck of mining semantics from log messages. It contains two steps, an end-to-end semantics miner …

Stop Words For Processing Software Engineering Documents: Do They Matter, Yaohou Fan, Chetan Arora, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Stop words, which are considered non-predictive, are often eliminated in natural language processing tasks. However, the definition of uninformative vocabulary is vague, so most algorithms use general knowledge-based stop lists to remove stop words. There is an ongoing debate among academics about the usefulness of stop word elimination, especially in domainspecific settings. In this work, we investigate the usefulness of stop word removal in a software engineering context. To do this, we replicate and experiment with three software engineering research tools from related work. Additionally, we construct a corpus of software engineering domain-related text from 10,000 Stack Overflow questions and …

Two Sides Of The Same Coin: Exploiting The Impact Of Identifiers In Neural Code Comprehension, Shuzheng Gao, Cuiyun Gao, Chaozheng Wang, Jun Sun, David Lo, Yue Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Previous studies have demonstrated that neural code comprehension models are vulnerable to identifier naming. By renaming as few as one identifier in the source code, the models would output completely irrelevant results, indicating that identifiers can be misleading for model prediction. However, identifiers are not completely detrimental to code comprehension, since the semantics of identifier names can be related to the program semantics. Well exploiting the two opposite impacts of identifiers is essential for enhancing the robustness and accuracy of neural code comprehension, and still remains under-explored. In this work, we propose to model the impact of identifiers from a …

Trustworthy And Synergistic Artificial Intelligence For Software Engineering: Vision And Roadmaps, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

For decades, much software engineering research has been dedicated to devising automated solutions aimed at enhancing developer productivity and elevating software quality. The past two decades have witnessed an unparalleled surge in the development of intelligent solutions tailored for software engineering tasks. This momentum established the Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering (AI4SE) area, which has swiftly become one of the most active and popular areas within the software engiueering field. This Future of Software Engineering (FoSE) paper navigates through several focal points. It commences with a succinct introduction and history of AI4SE. Thereafter, it underscores the core challenges inherent to …

Ncq: Code Reuse Support For Node.Js Developers, Brittany Reid, Marcelo D'Amorim, Markus Wagner, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code reuse is an important part of software development. The adoption of code reuse practices is especially common among Node.js developers. The Node.js package manager, NPM, indexes over 1 Million packages and developers often seek out packages to solve programming tasks. Due to the vast number of packages, selecting the right package is difficult and time consuming. With the goal of improving productivity of developers that heavily reuse code through third-party packages, we present Node Code Query (NCQ), a Read-Eval-Print-Loop environment that allows developers to 1) search for NPM packages using natural language queries, 2) search for code snippets related …

On-Device Deep Multi-Task Inference Via Multi-Task Zipping, Xiaoxi He, Xu Wang, Zimu Zhou, Jiahang Wu, Zheng Yang, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Future mobile devices are anticipated to perceive, understand and react to the world on their own by running multiple correlated deep neural networks locally on-device. Yet the complexity of these deep models needs to be trimmed down both within-model and cross-model to fit in mobile storage and memory. Previous studies squeeze the redundancy within a single model. In this work, we aim to reduce the redundancy across multiple models. We propose Multi-Task Zipping (MTZ), a framework to automatically merge correlated, pre-trained deep neural networks for cross-model compression. Central in MTZ is a layer-wise neuron sharing and incoming weight updating scheme …

Niche: A Curated Dataset Of Engineered Machine Learning Projects In Python, Ratnadira Widyasari, Zhou Yang, Ferdian Thung, Sheng Qin Sim, Fiona Wee, Camellia Lok, Jack Phan, Haodi Qi, Constance Tan, David Lo, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning (ML) has gained much attention and has been incorporated into our daily lives. While there are numerous publicly available ML projects on open source platforms such as GitHub, there have been limited attempts in filtering those projects to curate ML projects of high quality. The limited availability of such a high-quality dataset poses an obstacle to understanding ML projects. To help clear this obstacle, we present NICHE, a manually labelled dataset consisting of 572 ML projects. Based on the evidence of good software engineering practices, we label 441 of these projects as engineered and 131 as non-engineered. This …

Reworking Of The Arkansas Tech Human Resources Employee Records Software, Dalton J. George, Brayan Bonilla-Chavez, John Modica, Angelina Das

ATU Scholars Symposium

Evisions Argos is a real-time reporting tool used by Arkansas Tech in many record-keeping departments. Reworking HR's software using this tool, security and database access concerns were negated, as Argos is already connected to the University's backend. Using Argos, we have made ATU HR's employee records software more user friendly and built a system that can be pushed to production for use by the university. As a secondary portion to this final project, we developed a proof-of-concept web application using the MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) stack. This gave us the opportunity to produce a full-stack application from scratch as …

Arkavalley Liquor: Simplifying Restaurant Alcohol Orders, Isaiah A. Kitts, Dayton Drilling, Bradlee Treece, Cameron Lumpkin

ATU Scholars Symposium

The ArkaValley Liquor system is a web-based ordering platform designed to simplify the process of ordering alcohol for local restaurants. Currently, restaurants place orders by emailing the store, which makes it difficult to maintain a paper trail and track order details. With the ArkaValley Liquor system, the ordering process is automated, and all order details are saved in one central location. Each restaurant will have a login, ensuring only authorized individuals can place orders. The system will also provide a record of each restaurant's most recent order, making it easy to reorder if necessary. By using the ArkaValley Liquor system, …

The State Of Accessibility In Blackboard: Survey And User Reviews Case Study, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Wajdi Aljedaani, Stephanie Ludi, Mohammed Alkahtani, Marcelo M. Eler, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Nowadays, mobile applications (or apps) have become vital in our daily life, particularly within education. Many institutions increasingly rely on mobile apps to provide access to all their students. However, many education mobile apps remain inaccessible to users with disabilities who need to utilize accessibility features like talkback or screen reader features. Accessibility features have to be considered in mobile apps to foster equity and inclusion in the educational environment allowing to use of such apps without limitations. Gaps in the accessibility to educational systems persist.

Objective: In this paper, we focus on the accessibility of the Blackboard mobile …

Code Generation Based On Inference And Controlled Natural Language Input, Howard R. Dittmer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Over time the level of abstraction embodied in programming languages has continued to grow. Paradoxically, most programming languages still require programmers to conform to the language's rigid constructs. These constructs have been implemented in the name of efficiency for the computer. However, the continual increase in computing power allows us to consider techniques not so limited. To this end, we have created CABERNET, a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) based approach to program creation. CABERNET allows programmers to use a simple outline-based syntax. This syntax enables increased programmer efficiency.

CNLs have previously been used to document requirements. We have taken this …

Creating And Evaluating Dimensional Analysis Software For University Students, Ac Hýbl

Campus Research Month

Most scientific disciplines depend on mathematics to varying degrees. Real-world problems often include quantifiable measurements with units. For example, chemistry, physics, and pharmacology require flawless unit conversions and dimensional homogeneity to obtain acceptable results. Students often choose to ignore units until the end of the problem-solving process, but this introduces errors and robs students of a deep understanding of units. Current tools for teaching dimensional analysis are limited both in scope and accessibility. Unit Playground addresses this issue by providing an interactive interface to experiment with units and their relationships.

A Study Of A Collaborative Task Management Application Built On React Native Using The Basic Ux Framework, Andrei Modiga

Campus Research Month

Many times it can be difficult to accomplish all this is proposed in a meeting. This project aimed to build a simple planner application using React Native that allows groups of people to collaborate and stay organized. The application was built using the BASIC Framework as a guide, and featured a collaboration feature that enabled users to share tasks, projects, and communicate with one another in order to stay coordinated and productive. The user interface was designed for easy use, allowing for quick and efficient task management within a group. The goal of the application was to provide a useful …

Game-Based Learning Activities And Assignments, Samuel Rivera, Siegwart Mayr

Campus Research Month

The Center for Innovation and Research in Computing (CIRC) is creating a web application that uses game-based learning to help students be engaged and collaborate, as an adventure-based quest.

In this research project, the activity module was created for this web application. This module contains assignment creation, completion, and grading. These assignments can be included in the quests and courses. The seamless connection between the activity module and the course module was possible with the Yii framework.