Guest editorial: special issue on selected topics in automated software engineering

Abstract

The research field of automated software engineering has its genesis in the intersection of artificial intelligence and software engineering research; the conference series that led to the current Automated Software Engineering (ASE) conference started as Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) in 1986, changed name to Knowledge Based Software Engineering (KBSE) in 1991, and—recognizing the expansion of the field—changed name and broadened the scope to Automated Software Engineering (ASE) in 1997. This field is one of the largest and most vibrant in software engineering research. Significant research results in this field have been presented in the Automated Software Engineering Journal since 1994. The papers in this issue of the ASE Journal have been selected to represent outstanding work in recent research directions in automated software engineering. The first three papers are all related to data mining. In “Inferring Specifications for Resources from Natural Language API Documentation” Zhong, Zhang, Xie, and Mei are applying advances in data mining techniques to infer API interface specifications from API documentation written in natural language and use this information to detect inconsistencies between documented API usage and actual usage in the implementations. They illustrate their Doc2Spec on selected open source projects and show that it can detect real defects in existing projects. In “Mining Temporal Specifications from Object Usage” Wasylkowski and Zeller are also approaching a mining problem but they use static analysis and model check-