As a software system evolves, its test suite can accumulate redundancies over time. Test minimization aims at removing redundant test cases. However, current techniques remove whole test cases from the test suite using test adequacy criteria, such as code coverage. This has two limitations, namely (1) by removing a whole test case the corresponding test assertions are also lost, which can inhibit test suite effectiveness, (2) the issue of partly redundant test cases, i.e., tests with redundant test statements, is ignored. We propose a novel approach for fine-grained test case minimization. Our analysis is based on the inference of a test suite model that enables automated test reorganization within test cases. It enables removing redundancies at the test statement level, while preserving the coverage and test assertions of the test suite. We evaluated our approach, implemented in a tool called Testler, on the test suites of 15 open source projects. Our analysis shows that over 4,639 (24%) of the tests in these test suites are partly redundant, with over 11,819 redundant test statements in total. Our results show that Testler removes 43% of the redundant test statements, reducing the number of partly redundant tests by 52%. As a result, test suite execution time is reduced by up to 37% (20% on average), while maintaining the original statement coverage, branch coverage, test assertions, and fault detection capability.
{"title":"Fine-Grained Test Minimization","authors":"Arash Vahabzadeh, Andrea Stocco, A. Mesbah","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180203","url":null,"abstract":"As a software system evolves, its test suite can accumulate redundancies over time. Test minimization aims at removing redundant test cases. However, current techniques remove whole test cases from the test suite using test adequacy criteria, such as code coverage. This has two limitations, namely (1) by removing a whole test case the corresponding test assertions are also lost, which can inhibit test suite effectiveness, (2) the issue of partly redundant test cases, i.e., tests with redundant test statements, is ignored. We propose a novel approach for fine-grained test case minimization. Our analysis is based on the inference of a test suite model that enables automated test reorganization within test cases. It enables removing redundancies at the test statement level, while preserving the coverage and test assertions of the test suite. We evaluated our approach, implemented in a tool called Testler, on the test suites of 15 open source projects. Our analysis shows that over 4,639 (24%) of the tests in these test suites are partly redundant, with over 11,819 redundant test statements in total. Our results show that Testler removes 43% of the redundant test statements, reducing the number of partly redundant tests by 52%. As a result, test suite execution time is reduced by up to 37% (20% on average), while maintaining the original statement coverage, branch coverage, test assertions, and fault detection capability.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"42 1","pages":"210-221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73386120","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}
Shafiul Azam Chowdhury, Soumik Mohian, Sidharth Mehra, Siddhant Gawsane, Taylor T. Johnson, Christoph Csallner
Cyber-physical system (CPS) development tool chains are widely used in the design, simulation, and verification of CPS data-flow models. Commercial CPS tool chains such as MathWorks' Simulink generate artifacts such as code binaries that are widely deployed in embedded systems. Hardening such tool chains by testing is crucial since formally verifying them is currently infeasible. Existing differential testing frameworks such as CyFuzz can not generate models rich in language features, partly because these tool chains do not leverage the available informal Simulink specifications. Furthermore, no study of existing Simulink models is available, which could guide CyFuzz to generate realistic models. To address these shortcomings, we created the first large collection of public Simulink models and used the collected models' properties to guide random model generation. To further guide model generation we systematically collected semi-formal Simulink specifications. In our experiments on several hundred models, the resulting SLforge generator was more effective and efficient than the state-of-the-art tool CyFuzz. SLforge also found 8 new confirmed bugs in Simulink.
{"title":"Automatically Finding Bugs in a Commercial Cyber-Physical System Development Tool Chain With SLforge","authors":"Shafiul Azam Chowdhury, Soumik Mohian, Sidharth Mehra, Siddhant Gawsane, Taylor T. Johnson, Christoph Csallner","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180231","url":null,"abstract":"Cyber-physical system (CPS) development tool chains are widely used in the design, simulation, and verification of CPS data-flow models. Commercial CPS tool chains such as MathWorks' Simulink generate artifacts such as code binaries that are widely deployed in embedded systems. Hardening such tool chains by testing is crucial since formally verifying them is currently infeasible. Existing differential testing frameworks such as CyFuzz can not generate models rich in language features, partly because these tool chains do not leverage the available informal Simulink specifications. Furthermore, no study of existing Simulink models is available, which could guide CyFuzz to generate realistic models. To address these shortcomings, we created the first large collection of public Simulink models and used the collected models' properties to guide random model generation. To further guide model generation we systematically collected semi-formal Simulink specifications. In our experiments on several hundred models, the resulting SLforge generator was more effective and efficient than the state-of-the-art tool CyFuzz. SLforge also found 8 new confirmed bugs in Simulink.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"45 1","pages":"981-992"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85905650","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}
Pei Wang, Qinkun Bao, Li Wang, Shuai Wang, Zhaofeng Chen, Tao Wei, Dinghao Wu
The prosperity of smartphone markets has raised new concerns about software security on mobile platforms, leading to a growing demand for effective software obfuscation techniques. Due to various differences between the mobile and desktop ecosystems, obfuscation faces both technical and non-technical challenges when applied to mobile software. Although there have been quite a few software security solution providers launching their mobile app obfuscation services, it is yet unclear how real-world mobile developers perform obfuscation as part of their software engineering practices. Our research takes a first step to systematically studying the deployment of software obfuscation techniques in mobile software development. With the help of an automated but coarse-grained method, we computed the likelihood of an app being obfuscated for over a million app samples crawled from Apple App Store. We then inspected the top 6600 instances and managed to identify 601 obfuscated versions of 539 iOS apps. By analyzing this sample set with extensive manual effort, we made various observations that reveal the status quo of mobile obfuscation in the real world, providing insights into understanding and improving the situation of software protection on mobile platforms.
{"title":"Software Protection on the Go: A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Mobile App Obfuscation","authors":"Pei Wang, Qinkun Bao, Li Wang, Shuai Wang, Zhaofeng Chen, Tao Wei, Dinghao Wu","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180169","url":null,"abstract":"The prosperity of smartphone markets has raised new concerns about software security on mobile platforms, leading to a growing demand for effective software obfuscation techniques. Due to various differences between the mobile and desktop ecosystems, obfuscation faces both technical and non-technical challenges when applied to mobile software. Although there have been quite a few software security solution providers launching their mobile app obfuscation services, it is yet unclear how real-world mobile developers perform obfuscation as part of their software engineering practices. Our research takes a first step to systematically studying the deployment of software obfuscation techniques in mobile software development. With the help of an automated but coarse-grained method, we computed the likelihood of an app being obfuscated for over a million app samples crawled from Apple App Store. We then inspected the top 6600 instances and managed to identify 601 obfuscated versions of 539 iOS apps. By analyzing this sample set with extensive manual effort, we made various observations that reveal the status quo of mobile obfuscation in the real world, providing insights into understanding and improving the situation of software protection on mobile platforms.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"1 1","pages":"26-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86228934","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}
Automated unit testing reduces manual effort to write unit test drivers/stubs and generate unit test inputs. However, automatically generated unit test drivers/stubs raise false alarms because they often over-approximate real contexts of a target function f and allow infeasible executions off. To solve this problem, we have developed a concolic unit testing technique CONBRIO. To provide realistic context to f, it constructs an extended unit of f that consists of f and closely relevant functions to f. Also, CONBRIO filters out a false alarm by checking feasibility of a corresponding symbolic execution path with regard to f 's symbolic calling contexts obtained by combining symbolic execution paths of f 's closely related predecessor functions. In the experiments on the crash bugs of 15 real-world C programs, CONBRIO shows both high bug detection ability (i.e. 91.0% of the target bugs detected) and high precision (i.e. a true to false alarm ratio is 1:4.5). Also, CONBRIO detects 14 new bugs in 9 target C programs studied in papers on crash bug detection techniques.
{"title":"Precise Concolic Unit Testing of C Programs Using Extended Units and Symbolic Alarm Filtering","authors":"Yunho Kim, Yunja Choi, Moonzoo Kim","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180253","url":null,"abstract":"Automated unit testing reduces manual effort to write unit test drivers/stubs and generate unit test inputs. However, automatically generated unit test drivers/stubs raise false alarms because they often over-approximate real contexts of a target function f and allow infeasible executions off. To solve this problem, we have developed a concolic unit testing technique CONBRIO. To provide realistic context to f, it constructs an extended unit of f that consists of f and closely relevant functions to f. Also, CONBRIO filters out a false alarm by checking feasibility of a corresponding symbolic execution path with regard to f 's symbolic calling contexts obtained by combining symbolic execution paths of f 's closely related predecessor functions. In the experiments on the crash bugs of 15 real-world C programs, CONBRIO shows both high bug detection ability (i.e. 91.0% of the target bugs detected) and high precision (i.e. a true to false alarm ratio is 1:4.5). Also, CONBRIO detects 14 new bugs in 9 target C programs studied in papers on crash bug detection techniques.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"53 1","pages":"315-326"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85087600","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}
J. Castelein, M. Aniche, Mozhan Soltani, Annibale Panichella, A. Deursen
Database-centric systems strongly rely on SQL queries to manage and manipulate their data. These SQL commands can range from very simple selections to queries that involve several tables, subqueries, and grouping operations. And, as with any important piece of code, developers should properly test SQL queries. In order to completely test a SQL query, developers need to create test data that exercise all possible coverage targets in a query, e.g., JOINs and WHERE predicates. And indeed, this task can be challenging and time-consuming for complex queries. Previous studies have modeled the problem of generating test data as a constraint satisfaction problem and, with the help of SAT solvers, generate the required data. However, such approaches have strong limitations, such as partial support for queries with JOINs, subqueries, and strings (which are commonly used in SQL queries). In this paper, we model test data generation for SQL queries as a search-based problem. Then, we devise and evaluate three different approaches based on random search, biased random search, and genetic algorithms (GAs). The GA, in particular, uses a fitness function based on information extracted from the physical query plan of a database engine as search guidance. We then evaluate each approach in 2,135 queries extracted from three open source software and one industrial software system. Our results show that GA is able to completely cover 98.6% of all queries in the dataset, requiring only a few seconds per query. Moreover, it does not suffer from the limitations affecting state-of-the art techniques.
{"title":"Search-Based Test Data Generation for SQL Queries","authors":"J. Castelein, M. Aniche, Mozhan Soltani, Annibale Panichella, A. Deursen","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180202","url":null,"abstract":"Database-centric systems strongly rely on SQL queries to manage and manipulate their data. These SQL commands can range from very simple selections to queries that involve several tables, subqueries, and grouping operations. And, as with any important piece of code, developers should properly test SQL queries. In order to completely test a SQL query, developers need to create test data that exercise all possible coverage targets in a query, e.g., JOINs and WHERE predicates. And indeed, this task can be challenging and time-consuming for complex queries. Previous studies have modeled the problem of generating test data as a constraint satisfaction problem and, with the help of SAT solvers, generate the required data. However, such approaches have strong limitations, such as partial support for queries with JOINs, subqueries, and strings (which are commonly used in SQL queries). In this paper, we model test data generation for SQL queries as a search-based problem. Then, we devise and evaluate three different approaches based on random search, biased random search, and genetic algorithms (GAs). The GA, in particular, uses a fitness function based on information extracted from the physical query plan of a database engine as search guidance. We then evaluate each approach in 2,135 queries extracted from three open source software and one industrial software system. Our results show that GA is able to completely cover 98.6% of all queries in the dataset, requiring only a few seconds per query. Moreover, it does not suffer from the limitations affecting state-of-the art techniques.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"22 1","pages":"1220-1230"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83393138","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}
Asher Trockman, Shurui Zhou, Christian Kästner, Bogdan Vasilescu
In fast-paced, reuse-heavy, and distributed software development, the transparency provided by social coding platforms like GitHub is essential to decision making. Developers infer the quality of projects using visible cues, known as signals, collected from personal profile and repository pages. We report on a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical study of npm packages that explores the emerging phenomenon of repository badges, with which maintainers signal underlying qualities about their projects to contributors and users. We investigate which qualities maintainers intend to signal and how well badges correlate with those qualities. After surveying developers, mining 294,941 repositories, and applying statistical modeling and time-series analyses, we find that non-trivial badges, which display the build status, test coverage, and up-to-dateness of dependencies, are mostly reliable signals, correlating with more tests, better pull requests, and fresher dependencies. Displaying such badges correlates with best practices, but the effects do not always persist.
{"title":"Adding Sparkle to Social Coding: An Empirical Study of Repository Badges in the npm Ecosystem","authors":"Asher Trockman, Shurui Zhou, Christian Kästner, Bogdan Vasilescu","doi":"10.1145/3183440.3190335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3183440.3190335","url":null,"abstract":"In fast-paced, reuse-heavy, and distributed software development, the transparency provided by social coding platforms like GitHub is essential to decision making. Developers infer the quality of projects using visible cues, known as signals, collected from personal profile and repository pages. We report on a large-scale, mixed-methods empirical study of npm packages that explores the emerging phenomenon of repository badges, with which maintainers signal underlying qualities about their projects to contributors and users. We investigate which qualities maintainers intend to signal and how well badges correlate with those qualities. After surveying developers, mining 294,941 repositories, and applying statistical modeling and time-series analyses, we find that non-trivial badges, which display the build status, test coverage, and up-to-dateness of dependencies, are mostly reliable signals, correlating with more tests, better pull requests, and fresher dependencies. Displaying such badges correlates with best practices, but the effects do not always persist.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"30 1","pages":"511-522"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81388868","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}
In recent years, several automated GUI testing techniques for Android apps have been proposed. These tools have been shown to be effective in achieving good test coverage and in finding bugs without human intervention. Being automated, these tools typically run for a long time (say, for several hours), either until they saturate test coverage or until a testing time budget expires. Thus, these automated tools are not good at generating concise regression test suites that could be used for testing in incremental development of the apps and in regression testing. We propose a heuristic technique that helps create a small regression test suite for an Android app from a large test suite generated by an automated Android GUI testing tool. The key insight behind our technique is that if we can identify and remove some common forms of redundancies introduced by existing automated GUI testing tools, then we can drastically lower the time required to minimize a GUI test suite. We have implemented our algorithm in a prototype tool called DetReduce. We applied DetReduce to several Android apps and found that DetReduce reduces a test-suite by an average factor of16.9× in size and14.7× in running time. We also found that for a test suite generated by running SwiftHand and a randomized test generation algorithm for 8 hours, DetReduce minimizes the test suite in an average of 14.6 hours.
{"title":"DetReduce: Minimizing Android GUI Test Suites for Regression Testing","authors":"Wontae Choi, Koushik Sen, G. Necula, Wenyu Wang","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180173","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, several automated GUI testing techniques for Android apps have been proposed. These tools have been shown to be effective in achieving good test coverage and in finding bugs without human intervention. Being automated, these tools typically run for a long time (say, for several hours), either until they saturate test coverage or until a testing time budget expires. Thus, these automated tools are not good at generating concise regression test suites that could be used for testing in incremental development of the apps and in regression testing. We propose a heuristic technique that helps create a small regression test suite for an Android app from a large test suite generated by an automated Android GUI testing tool. The key insight behind our technique is that if we can identify and remove some common forms of redundancies introduced by existing automated GUI testing tools, then we can drastically lower the time required to minimize a GUI test suite. We have implemented our algorithm in a prototype tool called DetReduce. We applied DetReduce to several Android apps and found that DetReduce reduces a test-suite by an average factor of16.9× in size and14.7× in running time. We also found that for a test suite generated by running SwiftHand and a randomized test generation algorithm for 8 hours, DetReduce minimizes the test suite in an average of 14.6 hours.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"40 1","pages":"445-455"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81421152","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}
This research investigates how object-oriented inheritance is actually used in practice. The aim is to close the gap between inheritance guidance and inheritance practice. It is based on detailed analyses of 2440 inheritance hierarchies drawn from 14 open-source systems. The original contributions made by this paper concern pragmatic assessment of inheritance hierarchy design quality. The findings show that inheritance is very widely used but that most of the usage patterns that occur in practice are simple in structure. They are so simple that they may not require much inheritance-specific design consideration. On the other hand, the majority of classes defined using inheritance actually appear within a relatively small number of large, complex hierarchies. While some of these large hierarchies appear to have a consistent structure, often based on a problem domain model or a design pattern, others do not. Another contribution is that the quality of hierarchies, especially the large problematic ones, may be assessed in practice based on size, shape, and the definition and invocation of novel methods – all properties that can be detected automatically.
{"title":"Inheritance Usage Patterns in Open-Source Systems","authors":"Jamie Stevenson, M. Wood","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180168","url":null,"abstract":"This research investigates how object-oriented inheritance is actually used in practice. The aim is to close the gap between inheritance guidance and inheritance practice. It is based on detailed analyses of 2440 inheritance hierarchies drawn from 14 open-source systems. The original contributions made by this paper concern pragmatic assessment of inheritance hierarchy design quality. The findings show that inheritance is very widely used but that most of the usage patterns that occur in practice are simple in structure. They are so simple that they may not require much inheritance-specific design consideration. On the other hand, the majority of classes defined using inheritance actually appear within a relatively small number of large, complex hierarchies. While some of these large hierarchies appear to have a consistent structure, often based on a problem domain model or a design pattern, others do not. Another contribution is that the quality of hierarchies, especially the large problematic ones, may be assessed in practice based on size, shape, and the definition and invocation of novel methods – all properties that can be detected automatically.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"58 1","pages":"245-255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81621033","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}
Christopher Vendome, D. Germán, M. D. Penta, G. Bavota, M. Vásquez, D. Poshyvanyk
Software licenses dictate how source code or binaries can be modified, reused, and redistributed. In the case of open source projects, software licenses generally fit into two main categories, permissive and restrictive, depending on the degree to which they allow redistribution or modification under licenses different from the original one(s). Developers and organizations can also modify existing licenses, creating custom licenses with specific permissive/restrictive terms. Having such a variety of software licenses can create confusion among software developers, and can easily result in the introduction of licensing bugs, not necessarily limited to well-known license incompatibilities. In this work, we report a study aimed at characterizing licensing bugs by (i) building a catalog categorizing the types of licensing bugs developers and other stakeholders face, and (ii) understanding the implications licensing bugs have on the software projects they affect. The presented study is the result of the manual analysis of 1,200 discussions related to licensing bugs carried out in issue trackers and in five legal mailing lists of open source communities. Our findings uncover new types of licensing bugs not addressed in prior literature, and a detailed assessment of their implications.
{"title":"To Distribute or Not to Distribute? Why Licensing Bugs Matter","authors":"Christopher Vendome, D. Germán, M. D. Penta, G. Bavota, M. Vásquez, D. Poshyvanyk","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180221","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180221","url":null,"abstract":"Software licenses dictate how source code or binaries can be modified, reused, and redistributed. In the case of open source projects, software licenses generally fit into two main categories, permissive and restrictive, depending on the degree to which they allow redistribution or modification under licenses different from the original one(s). Developers and organizations can also modify existing licenses, creating custom licenses with specific permissive/restrictive terms. Having such a variety of software licenses can create confusion among software developers, and can easily result in the introduction of licensing bugs, not necessarily limited to well-known license incompatibilities. In this work, we report a study aimed at characterizing licensing bugs by (i) building a catalog categorizing the types of licensing bugs developers and other stakeholders face, and (ii) understanding the implications licensing bugs have on the software projects they affect. The presented study is the result of the manual analysis of 1,200 discussions related to licensing bugs carried out in issue trackers and in five legal mailing lists of open source communities. Our findings uncover new types of licensing bugs not addressed in prior literature, and a detailed assessment of their implications.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"27 1","pages":"268-279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82480580","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}
Rafael Dutra, Kevin Laeufer, J. Bachrach, Koushik Sen
In software and hardware testing, generating multiple inputs which satisfy a given set of constraints is an important problem with applications in fuzz testing and stimulus generation. However, it is a challenge to perform the sampling efficiently, while generating a diverse set of inputs which satisfy the constraints. We developed a new algorithm QuickSampler which requires a small number of solver calls to produce millions of samples which satisfy the constraints with high probability. We evaluate QuickSampler on large real-world benchmarks and show that it can produce unique valid solutions orders of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art sampling tools, with a distribution which is reasonably close to uniform in practice.
{"title":"Efficient Sampling of SAT Solutions for Testing","authors":"Rafael Dutra, Kevin Laeufer, J. Bachrach, Koushik Sen","doi":"10.1145/3180155.3180248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180248","url":null,"abstract":"In software and hardware testing, generating multiple inputs which satisfy a given set of constraints is an important problem with applications in fuzz testing and stimulus generation. However, it is a challenge to perform the sampling efficiently, while generating a diverse set of inputs which satisfy the constraints. We developed a new algorithm QuickSampler which requires a small number of solver calls to produce millions of samples which satisfy the constraints with high probability. We evaluate QuickSampler on large real-world benchmarks and show that it can produce unique valid solutions orders of magnitude faster than other state-of-the-art sampling tools, with a distribution which is reasonably close to uniform in practice.","PeriodicalId":6560,"journal":{"name":"2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)","volume":"4 1","pages":"549-559"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82515437","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}