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The programming language Prolog makes declarative programming possible, at least to a substantial extent. Programs may be written and reasoned about in terms of their declarative semantics. All the advantages of declarative programming are…

We present Alloy4Fun, a web application that enables online editing and sharing of Alloy models and instances, to be used mainly in an educational context. By introducing the notion of secret paragraphs and commands in the models, it also…

The standard way to teach models is by feeding them lots of data. However, this approach often teaches models incorrect ideas because they pick up on misleading signals in the data. To prevent such misconceptions, we must necessarily…

This paper shows the debugging facilities provided by the SLAM system. The SLAM system includes i) a specification language that integrates algebraic specifications and model-based specifications using the object oriented model. Class…

A system is said to be fail-secure, sometimes confused with fail-safe, if it maintains its security requirements even in the event of some faults. Fail-secure analyses are required by some validation schemes, such as some Common Criteria or…

The rising popularity of declarative languages and the hard to debug nature thereof have motivated the need for applicable, automated repair techniques for such languages. However, despite significant advances in the program repair of…

Debugging is considered as a rigorous but important feature of software engineering process. Since more than a decade, the software engineering research community is exploring different techniques for removal of faults from programs but it…

Many properties related to security or concurrency must be encoded as so-called hyperproperties, temporal properties that allow reasoning about multiple traces of a system. However, despite recent advances on model checking hyperproperties,…

Deep learning (DL) techniques are on the rise in the software engineering research community. More and more approaches have been developed on top of DL models, also due to the unprecedented amount of software-related data that can be used…

Prolog is a well-known declarative programming language commonly used in introductory courses on logic and reasoning. However, many students find Prolog challenging because it lacks the familiar debugging mechanisms found in imperative…

The trustworthiness of highly capable language models is put at risk when they are able to produce deceptive outputs. Moreover, when models are vulnerable to deception it undermines reliability. In this paper, we introduce a method to…

As systems become ever more complex, verification becomes more main stream. Event-B and Alloy are two formal specification languages based on fairly different methodologies. While Event-B uses theorem provers to prove that invariants hold…

This paper proposes a technique to help choose the best formal specification candidate among a set of alternatives. Given a set of specifications, our technique generates a suite of test cases that, once classified by the user as desirable…

Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…

Machine learning systems have become popular in fields such as marketing, financing, or data mining. While they are highly accurate, complex machine learning systems pose challenges for engineers and users. Their inherent complexity makes…

Large language models (LLMs) have become central to modern AI workflows, powering applications from open-ended text generation to complex agent-based reasoning. However, debugging these models remains a persistent challenge due to their…

The quality and correct functioning of software components embedded in electronic systems are of utmost concern especially for safety and mission-critical systems. Model-based testing and formal verification techniques can be employed to…

A Large Language Model (LLM) represents a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model that generates coherent content, including grammatically precise sentences, human-like paragraphs, and syntactically accurate code snippets. LLMs can play…

This paper explores the process of validation for the abstract syntax of a graphical notation. We define an unified specification for five of the UML diagrams used by the Discovery Method and, in this document, we illustrate how diagrams…

Design of large software systems requires rigorous application of software engineering methods covering all phases of the software process. Debugging during the early design phases is extremely important, because late bug-fixes are…