Visualizing Testsuites to Aid in Software Understanding

Agile software development methods such as eXtreme Programming have brought renewed attention to testing during the software development process, both as a quality assurance method and as a form of live documentation. It is for this reason that a software system’s testsuite is an ideal starting point for gaining knowledge about its inner...

Preventing Injection Attacks with Syntax Embeddings: A Host and Guest Language Independent Approach

Software written in one language often needs to construct sentences in another language, such as SQL queries, XML output, or shell command invocations. This is almost always done using unhygienic string manipulation, the concatenation of constants and client-supplied strings. A client can then supply specially crafted input that causes the...

Mining Software Repositories to Study Co-Evolution of Production & Test Code

Preprint of paper published in: ICST 2008 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, 2008; doi:10.1109/ICST.2008.47 Engineering software systems is a multidisciplinary activity, whereby a number of artifacts must be created — and maintained — synchronously. In this paper we investigatewhether...

Evaluating the Lifespan of Code Smells using Software Repository Mining

Preprint of paper published in: 16th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (CSMR), 27-30 March 2012; doi:10.1109/CSMR.2012.79 An anti-pattern is a commonly occurring solution to a recurring problem that will typically negatively impact code quality. Code smells are considered to be symptoms of anti-patterns and occur at...

A Light-weight Sanity Check for Implemented Architectures

Architecture evaluations offer many benefits, including the early detection of problems and a better understanding of the possibilities of a system. Although many methods are available to evaluate an architecture, studies have shown that the adoption of architecture evaluations in industry is low. A reason for this lack of adoption is that there...

DynSem: A DSL for Dynamic Semantics Specification

The formal definition the semantics of a programming language and its implementation are typically separately defined, with the risk of divergence such that properties of the formal semantics are not properties of the implementation. In this paper, we present DynSem, a domain-specific language for the specification of the dynamic semantics of...

Improving the Performance of a Large Scale Spreadsheet: A Case Study

Spreadsheets are used extensively for calculations in several domains, especially in finance and insurance. Spreadsheets offer a clear benefit to their users: they are an easy to learn application in which to express their business needs, however, there are downsides too. Like software, spreadsheets can have a long life span in which they are...