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Program reduction is a technique for simplifying large, failure-inducing programs into minimal reproducible test cases. Language-specific tools such as CReduce achieve strong performance by leveraging deep semantic knowledge of C/C++, but…

GitHub is the most widely used social, distributed version control system. It has around 10 million registered users and hosts over 16 million public repositories. Its user base is also very active as GitHub ranks in the top 100 Alexa most…

Much of the current software depends on open-source components, which in turn have complex dependencies on other open-source libraries. Vulnerabilities in open source therefore have potentially huge impacts. The goal of this work is to get…

When checking concurrent software using a finite-state model, we face a formidable state explosion problem. One solution to this problem is dependence-based program slicing, whose use can effectively reduce verification time. It is…

This paper explores the extent to which regular expressions (regexes) are portable across programming languages. Many languages offer similar regex syntaxes, and it would be natural to assume that regexes can be ported across language…

Modern software development is increasingly dependent on components, libraries and frameworks coming from third-party vendors or open-source suppliers and made available through a number of platforms (or forges). This way of writing…

Although Rust primarily intends to be a safe programming language that excludes undefined behaviour, it provides its users with the escape hatch of unsafe Rust, allowing them to circumvent some of its strong compile-time checks. This…

With the increase of complexity of modern software, social collaborative coding and reuse of open source software packages become more and more popular, which thus greatly enhances the development efficiency and software quality. However,…

Context. Software reusability mechanisms, like inheritance and delegation in Object-Oriented programming, are widely recognized as key instruments of software design. These are used to reduce the risks of source code being affected by…

Testing (conditional) independence of multivariate random variables is a task central to statistical inference and modelling in general - though unfortunately one for which to date there does not exist a practicable workflow. State-of-art…

Language-based ecosystems (LBE), i.e., software ecosystems based on a single programming language, are very common. Examples include the npm ecosystem for JavaScript, and PyPI for Python. These environments encourage code reuse between…

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is considered as one standard software architectural style to build web APIs that can integrate software systems over the internet. However, while connecting systems, RESTful APIs might also break the…

Context: Open-source ecosystems rely on sustained package maintenance. When maintenance slows or stops, Technical Lag (TL), the gap between installed and latest dependency versions accumulates, creating security and sustainability risks.…

Third-party libraries are a central building block to develop software systems. However, outdated third-party libraries are commonly used, and developers are usually less aware of the potential risks. Therefore, a quantitative and holistic…

Code retrieval is a common practice for programmers to reuse existing code snippets in open-source repositories. Given a user query (i.e., a natural language description), code retrieval aims at searching for the most relevant ones from a…

Dependencies between modules can trigger ripple effects when changes are made, making maintenance complex and costly, so minimizing these dependencies is crucial. Consequently, understanding what drives dependencies is important. One…

A common way of exposing functionality in contemporary systems is by providing a Web-API based on the REST API architectural guidelines. To describe REST APIs, the industry standard is currently OpenAPI-specifications. Test generation and…

Software requirement selection is to find an optimal set of requirements that gives the highest value for a release of software while keeping the cost within the budget. However, value-related dependencies among software requirements may…

Programming languages often demarcate the internal sandbox, consisting of entities such as objects and variables, from the outside world, e.g., files or network. Although communication with the external world poses fundamental challenges…

Rust, a popular systems-level programming language, has garnered widespread attention due to its features of achieving run-time efficiency and memory safety. With an increasing number of real-world projects adopting Rust, understanding how…