Related papers: Freeing Testers from Polluting Test Objectives

Defect prevention is the most vital but habitually neglected facet of software quality assurance in any project. If functional at all stages of software development, it can condense the time, overheads and wherewithal entailed to engineer a…

The software development process for embedded systems is getting faster and faster, which generally incurs an increase in the associated complexity. As a consequence, consumer electronics companies usually invest a lot of resources in fast…

Formally verified compilers and formally verified static analyzers are a solution to the problem that certain industries face when they have to demonstrate to authorities that the object code they run truly corresponds to its source code…

Code metrics are easy to define, but not so easy to justify. It is hard to prove that a metric is valid, i.e., that measured numerical values imply anything on the vaguely defined, yet crucial software properties such as complexity and…

Software testing is an important phase in the software development life-cycle because it helps in identifying bugs in a software system before it is shipped into the hand of its end users. There are numerous studies on how developers test…

Quality assurance makes sure the project will be completed based on the previously approved specifications, standards and functionality. It is required without defects and possible problems. It monitors and tries to progress the development…

Understanding code represents a core ability needed for automating software development tasks. While foundation models like LLMs show impressive results across many software engineering challenges, the extent of their true semantic…

Packer identification tools are a critical foundation of malware analysis, directly affecting unpacking, behavioral analysis, malware classification, and threat attribution. However, their semantic correctness is rarely validated. In…

Code completion, a highly valuable topic in the software development domain, has been increasingly promoted for use by recent advances in large language models (LLMs). To date, visible LLM-based code completion frameworks such as GitHub…

Benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) have predominantly assessed short-horizon, localized reasoning. Existing long-horizon suites (e.g. SWE-bench) rely on manually curated issues, so expanding or tuning difficulty demands expensive…

Pointers are a powerful, but dangerous feature provided by the C and C++ programming languages, and incorrect use of pointers is a common source of bugs and security vulnerabilities. Making secure software is crucial, as vulnerabilities…

Control barrier functions are a popular method of ensuring system safety, and these functions can be used to enforce invariance of a set under the dynamics of a system. A control barrier function must have certain properties, and one must…

Software clones have been an active area of research for the past two decades. However, although numerous clone detection tools are now available, only a small fraction of the literature has focused on tool evaluation, and this is in fact…

As modern software systems continue to grow in complexity, triage has become a fundamental process in system operations and maintenance. Triage aims to efficiently prioritize, assign, and assess issues to ensure the reliability of complex…

For all the successes in verifying low-level, efficient, security-critical code, little has been said or studied about the structure, architecture and engineering of such large-scale proof developments. We present the design, implementation…

Software reliability is critical in ensuring that the digital systems we depend on function correctly. In software development, increasing software reliability often involves testing. However, for complex and critical systems, developers…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing competence in solving mathematical reasoning problems. However, many open-source LLMs still struggle with errors in calculation and semantic understanding during intermediate reasoning…

Software fairness testing is a central method for evaluating AI systems, yet the meaning of fairness is often treated as fixed and universally applicable. This vision paper positions fairness testing as culturally situated and examines the…

This paper describes a new program simplification technique called program trimming that aims to improve the scalability and precision of safety checking tools. Given a program ${\mathcal P}$, program trimming generates a new program…

Software defect prediction plays a crucial role in estimating the most defect-prone components of software, and a large number of studies have pursued improving prediction accuracy within a project or across projects. However, the rules for…