Using C Language Extensions for Developing Embedded Software: A Case Study

We report on an industrial case study on developing the embedded software for a smart meter using the C programming language and domain-specific extensions of C such as components, physical units, state machines, registers and interrupts. We find that the extensions help significantly with managing the complexity of the software. They improve...

Detecting and Analyzing I/O Performance Regressions

Regression testing can be done by re-executing a test suite on different software versions and comparing the outcome. For functional testing, the outcome of such tests is either pass (correct behaviour) or fail (incorrect behaviour). For non-functional testing, such as performance testing, this is more challenging as correct and incorrect are...

Discovering Software License Constraints: Identifying a Binary’s Sources by Tracing Build Processes

With the current proliferation of open source software components, intellectual property in general, and copyright law in particular, has become a critical non-functional requirement for software systems. A key problem in license compliance engineering is that the legal constraints on a product depend on the licenses of all sources and other...

Test Confessions: A Study of Testing Practices for Plug-in Systems

Testing plug-in-based systems is challenging due to complex interactions among many different plug-ins, and variations in version and configuration. The objective of this paper is to increase our understanding of what testers and developers think and do when it comes to testing plug-inbased systems. To that end, we conduct a qualitative ...

Performing systematic literature reviews with Researchr: Tool demonstration

This paper describes the workflow for performing systematic literature reviews with the researchr digital library environment.

Sort-based Refactoring of Crosscutting Concerns to Aspects

Preprint of paper published in: LATE 2008 - Proceedings of the 2008 AOSD Workshop on Linking Aspect Technology and Evolution, 31 March-4 April 2008; doi:10.1145/1404953.1404957 Crosscutting concerns in object-oriented programming hinder evolution because of their symptoms: tangling and scattering. To benefit from the modularisation capabilities...

Documenting Typical Crosscutting Concerns

Our analysis of crosscutting concerns in real-life software systems (totaling over 500,000 LOC) and in aspect-oriented literature, indicated a number of properties that allow for their decomposition in primitive building blocks which are atomic crosscutting concerns. We identify these blocks as crosscutting concern sorts, and we use them to...

Formalizing typical crosscutting concerns

We present a consistent system for referring crosscutting functionality, relating crosscutting concerns to specific implementation idioms, and formalizing their underlying relations through queries. The system is based on generic crosscutting concerns that we organize and describe in a catalog. We have designed and implemented a tool support for...