Related papers: Source Code Optimization using Equivalent Mutants

Code obfuscation is a popular approach to turn program comprehension and analysis harder, with the aim of mitigating threats related to malicious reverse engineering and code tampering. However, programming languages that compile to high…

Increased reproducibility of machine learning research has been a driving force for dramatic improvements in learning performances. The scientific community further fosters this effort by including reproducibility ratings in reviewer forms…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

Mutation testing is an effective technique for assessing the effectiveness of test suites by systematically injecting artificial faults into programs. However, existing mutation testing techniques fall short in capturing many types of…

Despite extensive testing and correctness certification of their functional semantics, a number of compiler optimizations have been shown to violate security guarantees implemented in source code. While prior work has shed light on how such…

Software debloating techniques are applied to craft a specialized version of the program based on the user's requirements and remove irrelevant code accordingly. The debloated programs presumably maintain better performance and reduce the…

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in software engineering (SE), with source code embeddings playing a crucial role in tasks such as source code clone detection and source code…

Patch prioritization ranks candidate patches based on their likelihood of being correct. The fixing ingredients that are more likely to be the fix for a bug, share a high contextual similarity. A recent study shows that combining both…

The presence of software vulnerabilities is an ever-growing issue in software development. In most cases, it is desirable to detect vulnerabilities as early as possible, preferably in a just-in-time manner, when the vulnerable piece is…

Scientific software applications are increasingly developed by large interdiscplinary teams operating on functional modules organized around a common software framework, which is capable of integrating new functional capabilities without…

Quantum computing exhibits the unique capability to natively and efficiently encode various natural phenomena, promising theoretical speedups of several orders of magnitude. However, not all computational tasks can be efficiently executed…

Mutant selection refers to the problem of choosing, among a large number of mutants, the (few) ones that should be used by the testers. In view of this, we investigate the problem of selecting the fault revealing mutants, i.e., the mutants…

Mutation testing is an effective approach to evaluate and strengthen software test suites, but its adoption is currently limited by the mutants' execution computational cost. Several strategies have been proposed to reduce this cost (a.k.a.…

In mutation testing, the quality of a test suite is evaluated by introducing faults into a program and determining whether the program's tests detect them. Most existing approaches for mutation testing involve the application of a fixed set…

Software component reuse is the software engineering practice of developing new software products from existing components. A reuse library or component reuse repository organizes stores and manages reusable components. This paper describes…

Logic programs are now used as a representation of object-oriented source code in academic prototypes for about a decade. This representation allows a clear and concise implementation of analyses of the object-oriented source code. The full…

Similarity has been applied to a wide range of security applications, typically used in machine learning models. We examine the problem posed by masquerading samples; that is samples crafted by bad actors to be similar or near identical to…

Development of energy and performance-efficient embedded software is increasingly relying on application of complex transformations on the critical parts of the source code. Designers applying such nontrivial source code transformations are…

Two key contributions presented in this paper are: i) A method for building a dataset containing source code features extracted from source files taken from Open Source Software (OSS) and associated bug reports, ii) A predictive model for…

Mutation testing is a powerful technique for assessing and improving test suite quality that artificially introduces bugs and checks whether the test suites catch them. However, it is also computationally expensive and thus does not scale…