Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00036
Bo Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Junjie Chen, Dan Hao, P. Moscato
This artifact is related to our Research Track paper that is accepted at ICSME 2019 [1]. Metamorphic relations (MRs) describe the invariant relationships between program inputs and outputs. We propose AutoMR, a novel method for systematically inferring and cleansing MRs. AutoMR can discover various types of equality and inequality MRs through a search method (particle swarm optimization). It also employs matrix singular-value decomposition and constraint solving techniques to remove the redundant MRs in the search results. Our experiments on 37 numerical programs show that AutoMR can effectively infer accurate and succinct MRs and outperform the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, we show that the discovered MRs have high fault detection ability in mutation testing and differential testing.
{"title":"AutoMR: Automatic Discovery and Cleansing of Numerical Metamorphic Relations","authors":"Bo Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Junjie Chen, Dan Hao, P. Moscato","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00036","url":null,"abstract":"This artifact is related to our Research Track paper that is accepted at ICSME 2019 [1]. Metamorphic relations (MRs) describe the invariant relationships between program inputs and outputs. We propose AutoMR, a novel method for systematically inferring and cleansing MRs. AutoMR can discover various types of equality and inequality MRs through a search method (particle swarm optimization). It also employs matrix singular-value decomposition and constraint solving techniques to remove the redundant MRs in the search results. Our experiments on 37 numerical programs show that AutoMR can effectively infer accurate and succinct MRs and outperform the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, we show that the discovered MRs have high fault detection ability in mutation testing and differential testing.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124885165","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00010
Zeinab Abou Khalil, Eleni Constantinou, T. Mens, L. Duchien, Clément Quinton
Large open source software projects, like Eclipse, follow a continuous software development process, with a regular release cycle. During each release, new bugs are reported, triaged and resolved. Previous studies have focused on various aspects of bug fixing, such as bug triaging, bug prediction, and bug process analysis. Most studies, however, do not distinguish between what happens before and after each scheduled release. We are also unaware of studies that compare bug fixing activities across different project releases. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the bug handling process of Eclipse over a 15-year period, considering 138K bug reports from Bugzilla, including 16 annual Eclipse releases and two quarterly releases in 2018. We compare the bug resolution rate, the fixing rate, the bug triaging time and the fixing time before and after each release date, and we study the possible impact of "release pressure". Among others, our results reveal that Eclipse bug handling activity is improving over time, with an important decrease in the number of reported bugs before releases, an increase in the bug fixing rate and an increasingly balanced bug handling workload before and after releases. The recent transition from an annual to a quarterly release cycle continued to improve the bug handling process.
{"title":"A Longitudinal Analysis of Bug Handling Across Eclipse Releases","authors":"Zeinab Abou Khalil, Eleni Constantinou, T. Mens, L. Duchien, Clément Quinton","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00010","url":null,"abstract":"Large open source software projects, like Eclipse, follow a continuous software development process, with a regular release cycle. During each release, new bugs are reported, triaged and resolved. Previous studies have focused on various aspects of bug fixing, such as bug triaging, bug prediction, and bug process analysis. Most studies, however, do not distinguish between what happens before and after each scheduled release. We are also unaware of studies that compare bug fixing activities across different project releases. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the bug handling process of Eclipse over a 15-year period, considering 138K bug reports from Bugzilla, including 16 annual Eclipse releases and two quarterly releases in 2018. We compare the bug resolution rate, the fixing rate, the bug triaging time and the fixing time before and after each release date, and we study the possible impact of \"release pressure\". Among others, our results reveal that Eclipse bug handling activity is improving over time, with an important decrease in the number of reported bugs before releases, an increase in the bug fixing rate and an increasingly balanced bug handling workload before and after releases. The recent transition from an annual to a quarterly release cycle continued to improve the bug handling process.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125047048","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00098
Drew T. Guarnera
The present state of the art in gaze processing algorithms, for eye tracking data, targets general purpose application in studies using a variety of stimuli (prose, images, or video). This work proposes the development of a gaze processing algorithm specialized to support eye tracking in the field of software engineering. Enhancements to fixation identification with respect to source code tokens can have wide reaching implications for researchers and practitioners using eye tracking with software engineering tasks. This work will require infrastructure improvements to the iTrace framework and additional study to contextualize the relevance of individual source code tokens during comprehension activities. Details concerning the nature of the improvements and a plan research and development on this problem is presented.
{"title":"Enhancing Eye Tracking of Source Code: A Specialized Fixation Filter for Source Code","authors":"Drew T. Guarnera","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00098","url":null,"abstract":"The present state of the art in gaze processing algorithms, for eye tracking data, targets general purpose application in studies using a variety of stimuli (prose, images, or video). This work proposes the development of a gaze processing algorithm specialized to support eye tracking in the field of software engineering. Enhancements to fixation identification with respect to source code tokens can have wide reaching implications for researchers and practitioners using eye tracking with software engineering tasks. This work will require infrastructure improvements to the iTrace framework and additional study to contextualize the relevance of individual source code tokens during comprehension activities. Details concerning the nature of the improvements and a plan research and development on this problem is presented.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126180619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00034
Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, A. Zaidman, F. Ferrucci
The impact of developers' experience on several development practices has been widely investigated in the past. One of the most promising research fields is software testing, as many researchers found significant correlations between developers' experience and testing effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at further studying this relation, by focusing on how development teams' experience is associated with the assertion density, i.e., the number of assertions per test class KLOC, that has previously been shown as an effective way to decrease fault density. We perform a mixed-methods empirical study. First, we devise a statistical model relating development teams' experience and other control factors to the assertion density of test classes belonging to 12 software projects. This model enables us to investigate whether experience comes out as a statistically significant factor to explain assertion density. Second, we contrast the statistical findings with a survey study conducted with 57 developers, who were asked their opinions on how developer's experience is related to the way they add assertions in test code. Our findings suggest the existence of a relationship: on the one hand, the development team's experience is a statistically significant factor in most of the systems that we have investigated; on the other hand, developers confirm the importance of experience and team composition for the effective testing of production code.
{"title":"How the Experience of Development Teams Relates to Assertion Density of Test Classes","authors":"Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, A. Zaidman, F. Ferrucci","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00034","url":null,"abstract":"The impact of developers' experience on several development practices has been widely investigated in the past. One of the most promising research fields is software testing, as many researchers found significant correlations between developers' experience and testing effectiveness. In this paper, we aim at further studying this relation, by focusing on how development teams' experience is associated with the assertion density, i.e., the number of assertions per test class KLOC, that has previously been shown as an effective way to decrease fault density. We perform a mixed-methods empirical study. First, we devise a statistical model relating development teams' experience and other control factors to the assertion density of test classes belonging to 12 software projects. This model enables us to investigate whether experience comes out as a statistically significant factor to explain assertion density. Second, we contrast the statistical findings with a survey study conducted with 57 developers, who were asked their opinions on how developer's experience is related to the way they add assertions in test code. Our findings suggest the existence of a relationship: on the one hand, the development team's experience is a statistically significant factor in most of the systems that we have investigated; on the other hand, developers confirm the importance of experience and team composition for the effective testing of production code.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122687428","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00017
Kamonphop Srisopha, C. Phonsom, Keng-Nien Lin, B. Boehm
Prior work on mobile app reviews has demonstrated that user reviews contain a wealth of information and are seen as a potential source of requirements. However, most of the studies done in this area mainly focused on mining and analyzing user reviews from the US App Store, leaving reviews of users from other countries unexplored. In this paper, we seek to understand if the perception of the same apps between users from other countries and that from the US differs through analyzing user reviews. We retrieve 300,643 user reviews of the 15 most downloaded iOS apps of 2018, published directly by Apple, from nine English-speaking countries over the course of 5 months. We manually classify 3,358 reviews into several software quality and improvement factors. We leverage a random forest based algorithm to identify factors that can be used to differentiate reviews between the US and other countries. Our preliminary results show that all countries have some factors that are proportionally inconsistent with the US.
{"title":"Same App, Different Countries: A Preliminary User Reviews Study on Most Downloaded iOS Apps","authors":"Kamonphop Srisopha, C. Phonsom, Keng-Nien Lin, B. Boehm","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00017","url":null,"abstract":"Prior work on mobile app reviews has demonstrated that user reviews contain a wealth of information and are seen as a potential source of requirements. However, most of the studies done in this area mainly focused on mining and analyzing user reviews from the US App Store, leaving reviews of users from other countries unexplored. In this paper, we seek to understand if the perception of the same apps between users from other countries and that from the US differs through analyzing user reviews. We retrieve 300,643 user reviews of the 15 most downloaded iOS apps of 2018, published directly by Apple, from nine English-speaking countries over the course of 5 months. We manually classify 3,358 reviews into several software quality and improvement factors. We leverage a random forest based algorithm to identify factors that can be used to differentiate reviews between the US and other countries. Our preliminary results show that all countries have some factors that are proportionally inconsistent with the US.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114201853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00094
D. Dobrean
Mobile applications have grown to become complex software systems and some of the most used pieces of software by end users all around the world. With the increase in their complexity, software architecture has become an important topic and a pressure point in their development lifecycle. The purpose of this work is to define an automatic method for extracting and examining the software architecture of mobile applications by leveraging the use of Software Development Kits (SDKs) and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. The proposed system is used for finding architectural issues on the analysed codebase early in the development phase and provides insightful information for both software developers, architects as well as for the management team.
{"title":"Automatic Examining of Software Architectures on Mobile Applications Codebases","authors":"D. Dobrean","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00094","url":null,"abstract":"Mobile applications have grown to become complex software systems and some of the most used pieces of software by end users all around the world. With the increase in their complexity, software architecture has become an important topic and a pressure point in their development lifecycle. The purpose of this work is to define an automatic method for extracting and examining the software architecture of mobile applications by leveraging the use of Software Development Kits (SDKs) and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. The proposed system is used for finding architectural issues on the analysed codebase early in the development phase and provides insightful information for both software developers, architects as well as for the management team.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128773766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00092
M. Guerriero, Martin Garriga, D. Tamburri, Fabio Palomba
Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineering techniques. Using the data coming from 44 semistructured interviews to senior developers of as many companies, in this paper we shed light on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, we investigate (i) how practitioners adopt and develop IaC, (ii) which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used tools and their advantages/disadvantages, and (iii) what are the practitioner's needs when dealing with IaC development, maintenance, and evolution. Our findings clearly highlight the need for more research in the field: the support provided by currently available tools is still limited, and developers feel the need of novel techniques for testing and maintaining IaC code.
{"title":"Adoption, Support, and Challenges of Infrastructure-as-Code: Insights from Industry","authors":"M. Guerriero, Martin Garriga, D. Tamburri, Fabio Palomba","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00092","url":null,"abstract":"Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is the DevOps tactic of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. From a maintenance and evolution perspective, the topic has picked the interest of practitioners and academics alike, given the relative scarcity of supporting patterns, best practices, tools, and software engineering techniques. Using the data coming from 44 semistructured interviews to senior developers of as many companies, in this paper we shed light on the state of the practice in the adoption of IaC and the key software engineering challenges in the field. Particularly, we investigate (i) how practitioners adopt and develop IaC, (ii) which support is currently available, i.e., the typically used tools and their advantages/disadvantages, and (iii) what are the practitioner's needs when dealing with IaC development, maintenance, and evolution. Our findings clearly highlight the need for more research in the field: the support provided by currently available tools is still limited, and developers feel the need of novel techniques for testing and maintaining IaC code.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128586461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00071
William Ravelo-Méndez, Camilo Escobar-Velásquez, M. Linares-Vásquez
Mobile applications that involve the interaction of two or more users are becoming more common nowadays, and the demand of good performance and availability by their users is increasing. This makes testing and automation of processes essential for delivering high-quality cross-device apps. In this paper, we present Kraken, a cross-device testing tool that enables a tester to write, run, and validate test scenarios that involve the interaction of more than two devices as well as its underlying implementation. The proposed tool uses APKs as input along with tests scripts wrote using the Gherkin syntax. Kraken is publicly available on GitHub https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/KrakenMobile/ Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF5U8kfVgRcJ3RCHt7cWmwlqN93brbVW-
{"title":"Kraken-Mobile: Cross-Device Interaction-Based Testing of Android Apps","authors":"William Ravelo-Méndez, Camilo Escobar-Velásquez, M. Linares-Vásquez","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00071","url":null,"abstract":"Mobile applications that involve the interaction of two or more users are becoming more common nowadays, and the demand of good performance and availability by their users is increasing. This makes testing and automation of processes essential for delivering high-quality cross-device apps. In this paper, we present Kraken, a cross-device testing tool that enables a tester to write, run, and validate test scenarios that involve the interaction of more than two devices as well as its underlying implementation. The proposed tool uses APKs as input along with tests scripts wrote using the Gherkin syntax. Kraken is publicly available on GitHub https://thesoftwaredesignlab.github.io/KrakenMobile/ Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF5U8kfVgRcJ3RCHt7cWmwlqN93brbVW-","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116364732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Accomplishing a program task usually involves performing multiple activities in a logical order. Task-solving activities may have different relationships, such as subactivityof, precede-follow, and different attributes, such as location, condition, API, code. We refer to task-solving activities and their relationships and attributes as know-how knowledge. Programming task know-how knowledge is commonly documented in semi-structured textual tutorials. A formative study of the 20 top-viewed Android-tagged how-to questions on Stack Overflow suggests that developers are faced with three information barriers (incoherent modeling of task intent, tutorial information overload and unstructured task activity description) for effectively discovering and understanding task-solving knowledge in textual tutorials. Knowledge graph has been shown to be effective in representing relational knowledge and supporting knowledge search in a structured way. Unfortunately, existing knowledge graphs extract only know-what information (e.g., APIs, API caveats and API dependencies) from software documentation. In this paper, we devise open information extraction (OpenIE) techniques to extract candidates for task activities, activity attributes and activity relationships from programming task tutorials. The resulting knowledge graph, TaskKG, includes a hierarchical taxonomy of activities, three types of activities relationships and five types of activity attributes, and enables activity-centric knowledge search. As a proof-of-concept, we apply our approach to Android Developer Guide. A comprehensive evaluation of TaskKG shows high accuracy of our OpenIE techniques. A user study shows that TaskKG is promising in helping developers finding correct answers to programming how-to questions.
{"title":"Know-How in Programming Tasks: From Textual Tutorials to Task-Oriented Knowledge Graph","authors":"Jiamou Sun, Zhenchang Xing, Rui Chu, Heilai Bai, Jinshui Wang, Xin Peng","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00039","url":null,"abstract":"Accomplishing a program task usually involves performing multiple activities in a logical order. Task-solving activities may have different relationships, such as subactivityof, precede-follow, and different attributes, such as location, condition, API, code. We refer to task-solving activities and their relationships and attributes as know-how knowledge. Programming task know-how knowledge is commonly documented in semi-structured textual tutorials. A formative study of the 20 top-viewed Android-tagged how-to questions on Stack Overflow suggests that developers are faced with three information barriers (incoherent modeling of task intent, tutorial information overload and unstructured task activity description) for effectively discovering and understanding task-solving knowledge in textual tutorials. Knowledge graph has been shown to be effective in representing relational knowledge and supporting knowledge search in a structured way. Unfortunately, existing knowledge graphs extract only know-what information (e.g., APIs, API caveats and API dependencies) from software documentation. In this paper, we devise open information extraction (OpenIE) techniques to extract candidates for task activities, activity attributes and activity relationships from programming task tutorials. The resulting knowledge graph, TaskKG, includes a hierarchical taxonomy of activities, three types of activities relationships and five types of activity attributes, and enables activity-centric knowledge search. As a proof-of-concept, we apply our approach to Android Developer Guide. A comprehensive evaluation of TaskKG shows high accuracy of our OpenIE techniques. A user study shows that TaskKG is promising in helping developers finding correct answers to programming how-to questions.","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122522778","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1109/ICSME.2019.00057
Hang Li, Lin Yan, XiLiang Zhao
Philosophical principles are very useful in customization of Linux kernel, e.g., the answer for the question: "For the pointer to the start address of page table, is it a physical address or a virtual address?" can be derived by one simple philosophical principle: the depth of recursion is limited. This is because if the pointer were a virtual address, there would be another new page table to store the translation information of this virtual address, but who was responsible for storing the translation information of the start address of this new page table? This would result an infinite recursion. So the pointer definitely is a physical address. In fact, the usefulness of philosophical principles comes from the reduction of searching space. And this reduction is very important in customization of Linux kernel, for it could cut down the size of the new code needed to be read. This is especially valuable when considering that Linux kernel is continuously updating and huge now. Another example to further demonstrate the reduction of searching space in customization is showed in the following: in customization of file system in kernel version 3.10, the question: "Does the Linux kernel itself maintain the consistency between the buffer cache and the page cache?". This is a hard problem in practice, for without any guidance of philosophical principle, a developer has to read all of the code in Linux kernel to get a precise answer. The tricky part of this question is that if the developer only read a part of the codes and doesn't find any mechanisms for maintenance of cache consistency, the conclusion of non-existence of such mechanisms still can not be drawn, for there's still a possibility that such mechanisms exist in the codes not explored. Besides, if the developer search internet to find the answer, assume that the developer is lucky enough, he/she finally finds one program example on a web page shows that the inconsistency may raise between buffer cache and page cache. He/she still can not get the conclusion that Linux kernel does not maintain such consistency, because that program example maybe is only valid in a specific scenario, e.g. in kernel version 2.26, not 3.10. But we can get a satisfied answer by using the philosophical principle: the cost of management process should be far less than the value created by being managed process. By this principle, it can be drawn that Linux kernel doesn't maintain the consistency between the buffer cache and page cache in kernel 3.10. This is because that the data in buffer cache and page cache is highly dependent on application logic, so if Linux kernel wanted to maintain such consistency, it would have to track all these applications, which cost was much higher than the benefits that these applications could produce. However, the successful application of philosophical principles depends on two factors: firstly, establishment of a mapping between concepts in Linux system and well-known concepts in hum
{"title":"Application of Philosophical Principles in Linux Kernel Customization","authors":"Hang Li, Lin Yan, XiLiang Zhao","doi":"10.1109/ICSME.2019.00057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00057","url":null,"abstract":"Philosophical principles are very useful in customization of Linux kernel, e.g., the answer for the question: \"For the pointer to the start address of page table, is it a physical address or a virtual address?\" can be derived by one simple philosophical principle: the depth of recursion is limited. This is because if the pointer were a virtual address, there would be another new page table to store the translation information of this virtual address, but who was responsible for storing the translation information of the start address of this new page table? This would result an infinite recursion. So the pointer definitely is a physical address. In fact, the usefulness of philosophical principles comes from the reduction of searching space. And this reduction is very important in customization of Linux kernel, for it could cut down the size of the new code needed to be read. This is especially valuable when considering that Linux kernel is continuously updating and huge now. Another example to further demonstrate the reduction of searching space in customization is showed in the following: in customization of file system in kernel version 3.10, the question: \"Does the Linux kernel itself maintain the consistency between the buffer cache and the page cache?\". This is a hard problem in practice, for without any guidance of philosophical principle, a developer has to read all of the code in Linux kernel to get a precise answer. The tricky part of this question is that if the developer only read a part of the codes and doesn't find any mechanisms for maintenance of cache consistency, the conclusion of non-existence of such mechanisms still can not be drawn, for there's still a possibility that such mechanisms exist in the codes not explored. Besides, if the developer search internet to find the answer, assume that the developer is lucky enough, he/she finally finds one program example on a web page shows that the inconsistency may raise between buffer cache and page cache. He/she still can not get the conclusion that Linux kernel does not maintain such consistency, because that program example maybe is only valid in a specific scenario, e.g. in kernel version 2.26, not 3.10. But we can get a satisfied answer by using the philosophical principle: the cost of management process should be far less than the value created by being managed process. By this principle, it can be drawn that Linux kernel doesn't maintain the consistency between the buffer cache and page cache in kernel 3.10. This is because that the data in buffer cache and page cache is highly dependent on application logic, so if Linux kernel wanted to maintain such consistency, it would have to track all these applications, which cost was much higher than the benefits that these applications could produce. However, the successful application of philosophical principles depends on two factors: firstly, establishment of a mapping between concepts in Linux system and well-known concepts in hum","PeriodicalId":106748,"journal":{"name":"2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126285776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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