Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014). This conference publication contains the proceedings of ASE 2014, held in Vsters, Sweden, on September 15-19, 2014. The ASE Conference series is the premier research forum for automating software engineering. Each year, it brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss foundations, techniques and tools for automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems. It is a wonderful time to do research in automated software engineering! Everything is becoming programmable -- phones, TVs, tablets, cars, and even watches and glasses. Software engineers are the ones who bring life to these programmable devices by writing systems and applications software. As software engineering researchers, we are the ones who are tasked with developing techniques and tools that will help software engineers in meeting the exploding demand in software production. We are facing an endless list of research problems that not only bring many challenges, but also bring many opportunities for contribution and impact. ASE 2014 was located in Vsterås, Sweden's sixth largest city with a 1000-year-old history. Vsterås is a cultural, educational, and industrial city located by the beautiful Lake Mälaren. The city is the home of ABB's largest research center and it hosts other major companies like Bombardier Transportation, Westinghouse Electric Sweden, Alstom Power Sweden, Luvata Sweden, Enics Sweden, and nearby placed Volvo Construction Equipment. The exciting program of this year's ASE conference consisted of high quality contributions in this vibrant research area that were selected from a record number of submissions after a careful, thorough and selective reviewing process. This year, for the main track of the ASE conference, we invited three categories of submissions: (1) Technical Research Papers that describe innovative research in automating software development activities or automated support to users engaged in such activities; (2) Experience Papers that describe a significant experience in applying automated software engineering technologies and identify and discuss important lessons learned so that other researchers and/or practitioners can benefit from the experience; and (3) New Ideas Papers that describe novel research directions in automated software engineering that are in an early stage of investigation. We received 337 paper submissions this year -- a record for the ASE conference series! Thirteen submissions were desk rejected without review since they failed to follow the instructions given in the call for papers or were clearly out of scope of the conference. One paper was rejected as a double submission with another conference. The remaining 323 submissions -- 276 full papers and 48 new idea papers -- were reviewed by the members of the Program Committee and the Expert Review Panel, with each paper receiving at least 3 reviews. We also had a very active online discussion phase, with many long and detailed discussions among the members of the Program Committee and the Expert Review Panel. During a two-day physical PC meeting held at the University of Toronto on June 25--26, 2014, the members of the Program Committee compiled the final selection of papers to be presented at ASE 2014. This careful and thorough reviewing process resulted in selection of 50 technical research papers, 5 experience papers, and 27 new ideas papers (many of these were recategorized full papers). In addition to the papers presented in the main track, the ASE conference program also included 12 tool demonstration papers selected by the Tools Program Committee, and 10 doctoral symposium papers, selected by the Doctoral Symposium Committee. Two workshops and three tutorials were selected by the Tutorials and Workshops Program Committee and were co-located with the conference. Several other events were co-located with the ASE conference: the 7th International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) and the 13th International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts & Experiences (GPCE'14), together with their workshops, and the Working Meeting of Industrial Research School in Embedded Software and Systems (ITS-EASY). The ASE conference program was enriched by three keynote talks: Prof. Luciano Floridi from the University of Oxford on the logic of information design; Prof. Andrei Voronkov from the University of Manchester on the EasyChair system; and Dr. Magnus Larsson, Head of ABB's India Development Center, on experiences from developing industrial software systems with long lifecycles.

Welcome to Long Beach and the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. This year the conference is being held in North America in Long Beach, California. In addition to an exciting conference, we hope you enjoy the sunshine and numerous sites and activities available in the area.The Automated Software Engineering (ASE) conference is the major conference concerning the theory and practice of automating the software development process. The conference was formerly known as the "Knowledge-Based Software Engineering" conference (KBSE). The name was changed to "Automated Software Engineering" in 1997. At the same time, the conference was expanded to encourage world-wide participation and a broader set of scientific communities, including those concerned with automation of formal methods, software process, human-computer interaction, requirements engineering, reverse engineering, testing, verification and validation. The conference also continued to include participation of communities emphasizing the use of artificial intelligence and knowledge-based methods in software engineering. The ASE conference series has become a venue in which scientists exchange ideas about foundations, tools, techniques and applications of automated software engineering technology, including brand new technologies as well as reports of experience in applying technologies to practical problems.The papers appearing in these proceedings were subjected to a rigorous and highly selective reviewing process. A total of 291 papers were submitted to the conference. Each paper was reviewed by at least 3 members of the Program Committee. The committee accepted 28 for presentation as talks and publication as full papers, and 35 for presentation as posters and publication as short papers.In addition to the technical papers, the conference includes a doctoral symposium, tool demonstrations and tutorials. Several workshops are also co-located with ASE 2005, including: the Workshop on Software Security Assurance Tools, Techniques, and Metrics (SSATTM), the 3rd International Workshop on Traceability in Emerging Forms of Software Engineering (TEFSE'05); and the Workshop on Software Certificate Management (SoftCeMent'05).

Guest Editorial

Welcome to WEASELTech 2007, the 1st International ACM Workshop on Empirical Assessment of Software Engineering Languages and Technologies. WEASELTech '07 is held in conjunction with the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2007 in Atlanta Georgia on November 5th. Software-engineering research often involves new languages, notations, tools, and methods that a human designer or analyst uses to improve productivity, quality, etc. Inherent to any proposed tool, method, language, or notation is a claim that its use will benefit some development task. Ultimately, such claims must be validated empirically so that a practitioner, when looking to adopt a particular technique or tool, can make the choice based on rigorous scientific data. There are several different types of empirical study (e.g., surveys, case studies, and controlled experiments) each providing a different degree of strength and each appropriate to validate different kinds of empirical questions and contexts. Despite their importance, empirical studies of SE tools and approaches are rarely carried out, or at least rarely reported. Topics of interest include such things as case studies that apply a software-engineering tool or method to a realistically sized problem; controlled experiments that compare tools or methods with respect to some softwaredevelopment task; the usability of modeling languages and notations with respect to some task; and empirical studies that attempt to gauge the practical utility of automated verification tools. WEASELTech aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their experiences in evaluating an SE tool or method or artifacts that are used by a particular tool or method. WEASELTech received 15 manuscripts for review. These included industrial case studies, experience reports, and position papers. Each was reviewed by at least two members of the program and organizing committee. Of these submissions 11 were accepted for publication in the proceedings and inclusion in the technical program of the event.

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-

2008 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering - Workshops

This issue’s column reports on the 33rd International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution and 32nd International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. Topics include flaky tests, technical debt, QA bots, and regular expressions.

Humans play multifaceted roles in the lifecycle of software systems, from creation and design to coding, testing, and usage. Traditionally, software engineering and cyber security research have prioritized technical aspects such as functions, data, and processes, while neglecting crucial human factors. Human-centric software engineering and cyber security prioritizes the human element, ensuring usability, accessibility, and trust are central to design and implementation. The InternationalWorkshop on Human Centric Software Engineering & Cyber Security (HCSE&CS) aims to create a forum to discuss enhanced theories, models, tools, and practices that support next-generation human-centric approaches in software engineering and cyber security. The fifth edition of the HCSE&CS Workshop was held on 28 October 2024, alongside the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2024) in Sacramento, California, United States. It brought together experts to discuss not only traditional human-centric software engineering and cybersecurity challenges but also the evolving impact of large language models (LLMs) on software development and security. This report outlines the workshop's motivation and objectives and summarizes the presentations and discussions that took place during this event.

As the creators, designers, coders, testers, users, and occasional abusers of all software systems-including cyber security systems - humans should be at the centre of all design and development efforts. Despite this, most software engineering and cyber security research and practices tend to be function, data, or process oriented. In contrast, human-centric software engineering focuses on the human-centric issues critical to successful software systems' engineering. The aim of the International Workshop on Human Centric Software Engineering & Cyber Security (HCSE&CS) was to provide a venue for sharing research ideas and outcomes on enhanced theory, models, tools, and capability for next-generation human-centric software engineering and cyber security. The Second HCSE&CS Workshop was held on 15 November 2021 in conjunction with ASE 2021, the 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. It was originally intended to be held in Melbourne, Australia but was instead held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This post-workshop report provides an overview of the aims and motivation of the workshop as well as a summary of the presentations and discussions that took place during the workshop.

The second International Workshop on Software Mining (Soft-mine) was held on the 11th of November 2013. The workshop was held in conjunction with the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) in Silicon Valley, California, USA. The workshop has facilitated researchers who are interested in mining various types of software-related data and in applying data mining techniques to support software engineering tasks. During the workshop, seven papers on software mining and behavior models, execution trace mining, and bug localization and fixing were presented. One of the papers received the best paper award. Furthermore, there were two invited talk sessions presented by two active researchers from software engineering and data mining community.

Following along with the theme of this issue of IEEE Software, this column reports on papers about automatic program repair (APR) from the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE20), the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops (ASEW20), and the 13th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST20). Feedback or suggestions are welcome. In addition, if you try or adopt any of the practices included in the column, please send us and the authors a note about your experiences.

Over the past three decades, automation in software development has gone mainstream. Software development teams strive to automate as much of the software development activities as possible, spanning requirements specification, system modeling, code generation, testing, deployment, verification, as well as release phases, project status reporting and system maintenance. Automation helps to reduce development time and cost, as well as to concentrate knowledge by bringing quality into every step of the development process. The Workshop on Automated and verifiable Software sYstem DEvelopment (ASYDE) provided a forum to share and discuss innovative contributions to research and practice related to novel software engineering approaches to automated and verifiable development of software systems. The 5th edition took place on September 11th, 2023, in Kirchberg, Luxembourg. Notably, this marked the inaugural co-location of ASYDE with the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).

Analyzing, implementing and maintaining security requirements of software-intensive systems and achieving truly secure software requires planning for security from ground up, and continuously assuring that security is maintained across the software's lifecycle and even after deployment when software evolves. Given the increasing complexity of software systems, new application domains, dynamic and often critical operating conditions, the distributed nature of many software systems, and fast moving markets which put pressure on software vendors, building secure systems from ground up becomes even more challenging. Security-related issues have previously been targeted in software engineering sub-communities and venues. In the second edition of the International Workshop on Security from Design to Deployment (SEAD) at the International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2020, we aimed to bring the research and practitioner communities of requirements engineers, security experts, architects, developers, and testers together to identify foundations, and challenges, and to formulate solutions related to automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of secure software systems.

Over the past three decades, automation has become a central aspect of software development. Teams now strive to automate as many activities as possible, from requirements specification, to system maintenance. This shift towards automation has proven essential in reducing development time and costs while embedding quality into every phase of the development process. The Workshop on Automated and verifiable Software sYstem DEvelopment (ASYDE) provided a forum to share and discuss innovative contributions to research and practice related to novel software engineering approaches to automated and verifiable development of software systems. The 6th edition of ASYDE took place on October 28th, 2023, co-located with the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) in Sacramento, California, United States.

Model-driven development (MDD) comprises approaches to software development that heavily rely on modeling and the systematic transition from models to executable code. One of these approaches is the OMG’s model-driven architecture (MDA), which is based on the separation between the specification of a system and its implementation using specific platforms. The workshop on Model-Based Methodologies for Pervasive and Embedded Software (MOMPES) focuses on all the aspects related to the adoption of MDA and other MDD approaches, including language, process, methods, and tools, for supporting the construction of computer-based systems, and more specifically, pervasive and embedded software systems. In this issue, we are happy to present the best papers from MOMPES 2009 and 2010. MOMPES 2009, the sixth in this series of workshops, took place during the 31st IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2009) in Vancouver, Canada, on May 16. The seventh workshop, MOMPES 2010, was organized as a satellite event of the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2010), which took place in Antwerp, Belgium, on September. The issue contains selected, extended, and revised versions of papers presented in these two workshops following a second round of rigorous review.