ISEC2010
3rd India Software Engineering Conference
Mysore
Feb 25-27, 2010

     

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Keynote Speakers

David Notkin
Abstract & Bio: [PDF]
William R Cook
Abstract & Bio: [PDF]
Kris Gopalakrishnan
Abstract & Bio: [PDF]
CEO and MD, Infosys Technologies

ICSE Papers

Invariant-Based Automatic Testing of AJAX User Interfaces
Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award

Authors:

Ali Mesbah Arie van Deursen

Presenter : Ali Mesbah

Abstract : AJAX-based Web 2.0 applications rely on asynchronous communication, a stateful client, and client-side run-time manipulation of the DOM tree. This not only makes them fundamentally different from traditional web applications, but also more error-prone and harder to test. We propose a method for testing AJAX applications automatically. It is based on a crawler to infer a flow graph for all (client-side) user interface states. We identify AJAX specific faults that can occur in such states (related to DOM validity, error messages, discoverability, back-button compatibility, etc.) as well as DOM-tree invariants that serve as oracle to detect such faults. We implemented our approach in ATUSA, a tool offering generic invariant checking components, a plugin-mechanism to add application-specific state validators, and generation of a test suite covering the paths obtained during crawling. We describe two studies evaluating the fault revealing capabilities, scalability, manual effort and level of automation of our approach.


Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista
Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award

Authors :

Christian Bird Nachiappan Nagappan Premkumar Devanbu Harald Gall Brendan Murphy

Presenter : Christian Bird

Abstract : It is believed that distributed software development is more challenging than collocated development. Literature on distributed development in software engineering discusses various challenges, including cultural barriers, expertise transfer difficulties, and communication and coordination overhead. We evaluate this belief by examining the development of Windows Vista and comparing the failures of components that were developed in a distributed fashion with those developed by collocated teams. We found a negligible difference in failures. This difference becomes even less significant when controlling for the number of developers working on a binary. We also examine component characteristics such as code churn, complexity, dependency information, and test coverage to investigate if less complex components are distributed and find little difference between distributed and collocated components. Further, we examine the software process used during the Vista development cycle and present ways in which the development process utilized may be insensitive to geography by mitigating issues.


FSE Papers

Asserting and Checking Determinism for Multithreaded Programs
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper

Authors :

Jacob Burnim Koushik Sen

Presenter : Koushik Sen

Abstract : The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of parallelism. The most widespread method for writing parallel software is to use explicit threads. Writing correct multithreaded programs, however, has proven to be quite challenging in practice. The key difficulty is non-determinism. The threads of a parallel application may be interleaved non-deterministically during execution. In a buggy program, non-deterministic scheduling will lead to non-deterministic results---some interleavings will produce the correct result while others will not.

We propose an assertion framework for specifying that regions of a parallel program behave deterministically despite non-deterministic thread interleaving. Our framework allows programmers to write assertions involving pairs of program states arising from different parallel schedules. We describe an implementation of our deterministic assertions as a library for Java, and evaluate the utility of our specifications on a number of parallel Java benchmarks. We found specifying deterministic behavior to be quite simple using our assertions. Further, in experiments with our assertions, we were able to identify two races as true parallelism errors that lead to incorrect non-deterministic behavior. These races were distinguished from a number of benign races in the benchmarks.


DARWIN: An Approach for Debugging Evolving Programs
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper

Authors :

Dawei Qi Abhik Roychoudhury Zhenkai Liang Kapil Vaswani

Presenter : Kapil Vaswani

Abstract : Debugging refers to the laborious process of finding causes of program failures. Often, such failures are introduced when a program undergoes changes and evolves from a stable version to a new, modified version. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for debugging evolving programs. Given two programs (a reference, stable program and a new, modified program) and an input that fails on the modified program, our approach uses concrete as well as symbolic execution to synthesize new inputs that differ marginally from the failing input in their control flow behavior. A comparison of the execution traces of the failing input and the new inputs provides critical clues to the root-cause of the failure. A notable feature of our approach is that it handles hard-to-explain bugs like code missing errors by pointing to the relevant code in the reference program. We have implemented our approach in a tool called DARWIN. We have conducted experiments with several real-life case studies, including real-world web servers and the libPNG library for manipulating PNG images. Our experience from these experiments points to the efficacy of DARWIN in pinpointing bugs. Moreover, while localizing a given observable error, the new inputs synthesized by DARWIN can reveal other undiscovered errors.