Code Analysis Research Articles

Hybrid Framework To Exclude Similar and Faulty Test Cases In Regression Testing

Regression testing is a crucial phase in the software development lifecycle that makes sure that new changes/updates in the software system don’t introduce defects or don’t affect adversely the existing functionalities. However, as the software systems grow in complexity, the number of test cases in regression suite can become large which results into more testing time and resource consumption. In addition, the presence of redundant and faulty test cases may affect the efficiency of the regression testing process. Therefore, this paper presents a new Hybrid Framework to Exclude Similar & Faulty Test Cases in Regression Testing (ETCPM) that utilizes automated code analysis techniques and historical test execution data to identity and exclude redundant, similar and faulty test cases from the given regression suite. Our experimental results clearly show the benefits of the ETCPM framework in terms of reduction in the testing time, optimization of the resource allocation, and improvement in the overall quality of regression test suite. ETCPM enables software development teams to achieve faster and reliable regression testing by intelligent exclusion of similar and fault test cases, which yields in reduction in the software delivery cycles and better end user satisfaction.

Intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership: Considering the potential for financial elder abuse

AbstractIntergenerational financial assistance with home ownership has attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent years. Existing research has focussed primarily on its impact on inequality, housing market outcomes and notions of meritocracy, as well as the relational dynamics through which it is negotiated. The topic of financial elder abuse has, however, remained an area of relative silence in this literature despite concerns raised by advocacy groups. In this article, we consider how intergenerational financial assistance may facilitate attitudes and behaviours that can result in financial elder abuse. To do so, we draw on an analysis of the Banking Code of Practice and the presumption of advancement, each of which shapes the way intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership unfolds in Australia. We then consider how such arrangements play out in practice through analysis of interviews conducted with donors and recipients of assistance of this type. We ultimately argue that in the context of intergenerational financial assistance with home ownership, the potential for financial elder abuse should be considered not just as an individual or family issue rooted in relationships, but as the outcome of ageist social attitudes and structural problems in the asset economy.

Гражданское процессуальное и трудовое законодательство о немедленном исполнении судебных постановлений по индивидуальным трудовым спорам

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation and the Labor Code of the Russian Federation on the immediate execution of decisions and court orders in disputes about reinstatement at work and collection of wages, the article notes the differences in the codes on this issue, and suggests options for resolving conflicts between the provisions of the designated regulatory legal acts.

The Analysis of Code–Mixing in Lyrics of Rungkad

In 1940 there is a song with title Kopral Jono that put code mixing in the lyrics “Aksimu bung very good seperti mas Robin Hood”. In 2024 code mixing can be found in a lot of songs, one of them is Rungkad created by Vicky Tri Prasetyo and popularized by Nella Kharisma. This research is conducted to find the forms of code mixing and the factors causing code mixing. The data collection technique in this research uses two techniques, namely reading and note-taking techniques. The data collection procedure is by reading the song lyrics, marking words, phrases, clauses, word repetitions, idioms, basters which indicate code mixing, noting the marked words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and then grouping the data which indicates code mixing according to the research problem. In Rungkad song there are 39 data of code mixing found in the form of inserting word element for 27 data, inserting phrase elements for 9 data and, inserting clause elements for 3 data. Meanwhile, for code mixing, inserting bastards, idioms and repetitions elements were not found at all. The form of code mixing in the Rungkad song lyrics is dominated by the form of code mixing in the form of inserting word elements, while the choice of language varieties is dominated by Javanese and Indonesian. The factors that cause code mixing in the song lyrics are speaker factors and language factors. Keywords: Code – Mixing, Forms and Factors, Lyrics Rungkad Dangdut Songs

Evolution of automated weakness detection in Ethereum bytecode: a comprehensive study

Blockchain programs (also known as smart contracts) manage valuable assets like cryptocurrencies and tokens, and implement protocols in domains like decentralized finance (DeFi) and supply-chain management. These types of applications require a high level of security that is hard to achieve due to the transparency of public blockchains. Numerous tools support developers and auditors in the task of detecting weaknesses. As a young technology, blockchains and utilities evolve fast, making it challenging for tools and developers to keep up with the pace. In this work, we study the robustness of code analysis tools and the evolution of weakness detection on a dataset representing six years of blockchain activity. We focus on Ethereum as the crypto ecosystem with the largest number of developers and deployed programs. We investigate the behavior of single tools as well as the agreement of several tools addressing similar weaknesses. Our study is the first that is based on the entire body of deployed bytecode on Ethereum’s main chain. We achieve this coverage by considering bytecodes as equivalent if they share the same skeleton. The skeleton of a bytecode is obtained by omitting functionally irrelevant parts. This reduces the 48 million contracts deployed on Ethereum up to January 2022 to 248 328 contracts with distinct skeletons. For bulk execution, we utilize the open-source framework SmartBugs that facilitates the analysis of Solidity smart contracts, and enhance it to accept also bytecode as the only input. Moreover, we integrate six further tools for bytecode analysis. The execution of the 12 tools included in our study on the dataset took 30 CPU years. While the tools report a total of 1 307 486 potential weaknesses, we observe a decrease in reported weaknesses over time, as well as a degradation of tools to varying degrees.

Digital methods for sensory media research: Toolmaking as a critical technical practice

‘Digital methods’ turn to medium-specific and online avenues for social and cultural research. While these approaches foster empirical media studies, it has become increasingly challenging to ‘follow the medium’ and ‘repurpose’ its methods. The prominence of sensory media such as ‘smart’ networked devices (e.g. mobile phones) in mundane practices and their infrastructural dependencies confront media scholars with highly contingent objects of study. Yet, studying such sensor-based devices is crucial, for they enable continuous and unnoticed monitoring of everyday (inter)activity. The article suggests that developing digital methods for sensory media can be understood as specific ‘critical technical practice’ (CTP) by engaging with two toolmaking stories. It draws on and emphasises the fundamental similarity between CTP and digital methods which both aim at conjoining technical engagement and understanding with methodological reflection. The toolmaking stories explicate the making of and the limitations to developing digital methods for increasingly obfuscated mobile sensory media, exploring the possibilities of repurposing their functionality and data. They include building tools for app code analysis focused on apps’ capacity to track sensor data, as well as for ‘sensing’ and analysing network traffic of mobile devices in use. The featured toolmaking then unravels distinctive research affordances, that is, action possibilities for ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ modes of analysis grappling with the technicity of mobile sensory media and their data. We argue that toolmaking as CTP for sensory media studies implies engaging with these media as entangled infrastructures, examining not just their social, but also their technical ‘multi-situatedness’. This involves investigating the ‘liveliness’ of their data, or how it is generated, processed and made sense of. In conclusion, we discuss implications for ‘doing digital methods’ in sensory media research. Toolmaking itself becomes an inevitable form of media research and critique, inviting and challenging researchers to deploy the media’s situatedness for their investigations.

Information-theoretical analysis of the neural code for decoupled face representation.

Processing faces accurately and efficiently is a key capability of humans and other animals that engage in sophisticated social tasks. Recent studies reported a decoupled coding for faces in the primate inferotemporal cortex, with two separate neural populations coding for the geometric position of (texture-free) facial landmarks and for the image texture at fixed landmark positions, respectively. Here, we formally assess the efficiency of this decoupled coding by appealing to the information-theoretic notion of description length, which quantifies the amount of information that is saved when encoding novel facial images, with a given precision. We show that despite decoupled coding describes the facial images in terms of two sets of principal components (of landmark shape and image texture), it is more efficient (i.e., yields more information compression) than the encoding in terms of the image principal components only, which corresponds to the widely used eigenface method. The advantage of decoupled coding over eigenface coding increases with image resolution and is especially prominent when coding variants of training set images that only differ in facial expressions. Moreover, we demonstrate that decoupled coding entails better performance in three different tasks: the representation of facial images, the (daydream) sampling of novel facial images, and the recognition of facial identities and gender. In summary, our study provides a first principle perspective on the efficiency and accuracy of the decoupled coding of facial stimuli reported in the primate inferotemporal cortex.

A Comparative Study of Commit Representations for JIT Vulnerability Prediction

With the evolution of software systems, their size and complexity are rising rapidly. Identifying vulnerabilities as early as possible is crucial for ensuring high software quality and security. Just-in-time (JIT) vulnerability prediction, which aims to find vulnerabilities at the time of commit, has increasingly become a focus of attention. In our work, we present a comparative study to provide insights into the current state of JIT vulnerability prediction by examining three candidate models: CC2Vec, DeepJIT, and Code Change Tree. These unique approaches aptly represent the various techniques used in the field, allowing us to offer a thorough description of the current limitations and strengths of JIT vulnerability prediction. Our focus was on the predictive power of the models, their usability in terms of false positive (FP) rates, and the granularity of the source code analysis they are capable of handling. For training and evaluation, we used two recently published datasets containing vulnerability-inducing commits: ProjectKB and Defectors. Our results highlight the trade-offs between predictive accuracy and operational flexibility and also provide guidance on the use of ML-based automation for developers, especially considering false positive rates in commit-based vulnerability prediction. These findings can serve as crucial insights for future research and practical applications in software security.

Corporate Governance Reform and Real Earnings Management in Nigeria: An Analysis of pre and post mandatory Code of 2018

Corporate Governance Reform and Real Earnings Management in Nigeria: An Analysis of pre and post mandatory Code of 2018

Diptych A. S. Byatt “Angels and Insects” as a sample of Postmodern Victorianа

Attention in this research is focused on the A. S. Byatt’s diptych “Angels and Insects”. The article analyses the specifics of the Victorian code functioning in the diptych, which forms the basis of the original Victoriana of a modern British novelist. “Angels and Insects” is chosen as a special and demonstrative example of the reception and interpretation of the Victorian era’s cultural, historical and artistic heritage by modern British writers, and “Angels and Insects” demonstrates a productive dialogue with Victorianism and, at the same time, conceptual shifts in its understanding and highlighting of the problems of Victorian life that were on the margins of Victorian narratives. Since the Victorian code defines the diptych’s architectonics, then the purpose of the article is a study of the Victorian code features and peculiarities of its representation in the diptych “Angels and Insects” by A. S. Byatt. In the article we used such methods as hystorical-literary and historical-cultural, as well as elements of gender analysis method. A. S. Byatt reproduces the Victorian era with the help of stylization and pastiche. The atmosphere of Victorianism is created through the depiction of a vivid panorama of the Victorian: key Victorian ideological and philosophical trends and antinomies, scientific and religious controversies, Victorian values, a special Victorian lifestyle, estates and interiors, traditions and customs, the distribution of male and female roles in society and the family, the circle of everyday interests and leisure. At the same time, Victorianism is reinterpreted as postmodern vision and with the help of a postmodern writing strategy. A. S. Byatt draws attention to what was hushed up and marginalized in Victorian times, raising the topics of incestuous and homosexual relationships, creating different types of Victorian women, including images of the new Victorian woman (Matty Crompton, Emily Tennison): intelligent, talented, and independent. A. S. Byatt updates the classic realistic Victorian novel’s tradition (dating events and specific names of action’s places, realistic details of the material world, portraits and landscapes), but does so in a language accessible to the modern reader. The identification of the Victorian code key components in the diptych constitutes the originality of the study. The analysis of the Victorian code in “Angels and Insects” makes possible to state that there is a “Victorian text” in its both novellas. All of the above gives reason to conclude that “Angels and Insects” can be considered an original artistic encyclopedia of Victorianism.

ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ ЭТИЧЕСКИХ НОРМ СОТРУДНИКОВ КОНТРОЛЬНО-СЧЕТНЫХ ОРГАНОВ РОССИИ

This study examines the issues of the ethical code of employees of the external financial control bodies of Russia, as well as their impact on the organization of the activities of control and accounting bodies. This is a special category of employees for whom the format of their behavior in front of the state, subjects, municipalities and society as a whole should be determined. These employees must have high moral and ethical standards, be impeccable and correct. In any situation, the behavior of employees of external financial control should be impeccable, open, and friendly. Behavior should be characterized by impeccable characteristics both at work and at home. An employee may not act in a vicious manner, reduce the authority of the supervisory authority, or transfer information to third parties that has become available as a result of official activities. The paper analyzes the code of ethics and official conduct adopted by the community of control bodies at the federal and regional levels. The conclusions are formulated based on the analysis of the ethical code of employees of the external financial control of the subjects of Russia in relation to each employee of these control bodies. These rules must be consistent with each other, implemented and controlled in all areas of activity.

Культурный код Великого Новгорода: современность исторического города. Экспертное интервью

The expert interview is devoted to the analysis of the cultural code of Veliky Novgorod and to the architectural techniques, which represent it in the urban environment. The expert considers the general concept of cultural code and examines the modern situation of Veliky Novgorod, where only a small part of authentic objects has been preserved, as most of the structures were destroyed during the Great Patriotic War. Also, the expert evaluates various city objects and projects in terms of combination of Novgorod architectural motifs and modern solutions in them, and emphasizes that the design code, which has been introduced in Veliky Novgorod since 2024, is very poorly connected with the cultural identity of the city. The key thesis of the interview is that all urban objects that are located outside the historic part of the city (outside the berm boundaries) should be resolved in a modern architectural language. In addition, the creation of new projects in contrast with the existing urban environment is described as one of the possible and productive strategies for working in the historical area of the city. In this way, contemporary architects and urban planners can make their original, authorial contribution to the historical city and leave their mark on the urban texture.

Facilitating listeners’ understanding of scientific knowledge in TED Talks: A corpus-based analysis of code glosses as metadiscourse resources of popularization

A considerable amount of research has established that media discourse is an interactive event whose success and efficiency depend on speaker-listener relationship. Yet the nature of this interaction has been explored in a great number of studies, few works deal with how TED speakers address the needs of their listeners and manage the interaction with them. TED is considered to be one of the new ways of spreading scientific information online. Due to being an emerging genre, TED Talks have barely been analyzed in terms of popularization tools used to facilitate listeners’ comprehension of materials presented by TED speakers. Drawing on a corpus of 80 transcripts of TED Talks derived from the ted.com website, this study explores how TED speakers elaborate their ideas to address listeners’ needs. The aim of this research is to explore the types of code glosses, their lexical realizations, pragmatic functions and frequencies of occurrence. In order to explore the types and frequency of code glosses employed in TED lectures, the present study applied the quantitative method. With the aim of identifying the pragmatic functions the code glosses serve in TED Talks, the study applied the interpretative method. The analysis of the corpus revealed that code glosses are a crucial element of expert-lay interactions serving the popularization function. Two types of code glossing were employed by TED speakers with the predominance of exemplifiers intended to facilitate listeners’ comprehension and make speaker’s ideas accessible through illustration or scenario-based elaboration. All code glosses found in the corpus serve the popularization purpose which indicates that TED speakers made attempts to recontextualize scientific content and make specialized concepts comprehensible for a lay listener.

Comparing semantic graph representations of source code: The case of automatic feedback on programming assignments

Static source code analysis techniques are gaining relevance in automated assessment of programming assignments as they can provide less rigorous evaluation and more comprehensive and formative feedback. These techniques focus on source code aspects rather than requiring effective code execution. To this end, syntactic and semantic information encoded in textual data is typically represented internally as graphs, after parsing and other preprocessing stages. Static automated assessment techniques, therefore, draw inferences from intermediate representations to determine the correctness of a solution and derive feedback. Consequently, achieving the most effective semantic graph representation of source code for the specific task is critical, impacting both techniques? accuracy, outcome, and execution time. This paper aims to provide a thorough comparison of the most widespread semantic graph representations for the automated assessment of programming assignments, including usage examples, facets, and costs for each of these representations. A benchmark has been conducted to assess their cost using the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) as a baseline. The results demonstrate that the Code Property Graph (CPG) is the most feature-rich representation, but also the largest and most space-consuming (about 33% more than AST).

On the Automated Unit Tests Generation for Java Applications using Spring Framework

This paper considers the automated unit tests generation for programs written in Java using the Spring framework. Although several test generation tools for “pure” Java applications have been developed in recent decades, the features of this framework are mostly not taken into account. However, Spring is used to develop many industrial Java applications. At the same time, the presence of Spring components in the application for which the tests are generated imposes additional requirements not only on the code analysis approaches, but also on the structure of the generated tests. The main source of the information about object types and their properties is the Spring application context. The paper proposes an instrument for analyzing the application context, that in some cases allows generating test scenarios corresponding to real program executions and avoiding excessive mocking. The full initialization of the application context does not occur during this analysis. It makes the test generation safe for user data. The proposed instrument for analyzing the Spring context has been integrated into the UnitTestBot Java automatic test generation tool. We also provide examples of tests generated for real open-source projects.

BiT5: A Bidirectional NLP Approach for Advanced Vulnerability Detection in Codebase

In this research paper, a detailed investigation presents the utilization of the BiT5 Bidirectional NLP model for detecting vulnerabilities within codebases. The study addresses the pressing need for techniques enhancing software security by effectively identifying vulnerabilities. Methodologically, the paper introduces BiT5, specifically designed for code analysis and vulnerability detection, encompassing dataset collection, preprocessing steps, and model fine-tuning.The key findings underscore BiT5’s efficacy in pinpointing vulnerabilities within code snippets, notably reducing both false positives and false negatives. This research contributes by offering a methodology for leveraging BiT5 in vulnerability detection, thus significantly bolstering software security and mitigating risks associated with code vulnerabilities.

Thefittest: evolutionary machine learning in Python

Thefittest is a new Python library specializing in evolutionary optimization methods and machine learning methods that use evolutionary optimization methods. Thefittest provides both classical evolutionary algorithms and efficient modifications of these algorithms that do not have implementations in the open access. Among the advantages of the library are the performance of the implemented methods, accessibility and ease of use. The paper discusses the motivation for developing and leading the project, describes the structure of the library with examples of use, and provides a comparison with other projects with a similar development goal. Thefittest is an open-source project published on GitHub and PyPi, developed using modern methods of code analysis and testing. At the moment of writing the paper, the latest version of the library is 0.2.3.

Analysis Tools in Geant4

Analysis Tools in Geant4

A Clustering-Based Computational Model to Group Students With Similar Programming Skills From Automatic Source Code Analysis Using Novel Features

Throughout a programming course, students develop various source code tasks. Using these tasks to track students' progress can provide clues to the strengths and weaknesses found in each learning topic. This practice allows the teacher to intervene in learning in the first few weeks of class and maximize student gains. However, the biggest challenge is to overcome the amount of work required of the teacher in the manual analysis of all tasks. In this context, our main research objective is to automatically group students with similar programming skills based on the analysis of their submitted source codes. Our research is applied and uses an experimental procedure. First, we prepared the database, with more than 700 real-world source code tasks written in C Language, and distributed it in five different learning topics. Afterward, we define a set of features to be extracted from each learning topic. We defined and extracted 23 features from the source code for five learning topics. Then, we preprocess our database and extract the proposed features. Finally, we grouped the students. After performing the grouping, we obtained four groups of students, which were analyzed using a cluster midpoint calculation. Our results support the monitoring of students throughout the term, offering the teacher the freedom to create new exercises and waiving the obligation of any specific programming environment. We believe that these results can support the teacher in pedagogical decisions closer to the needs of each group of students.

Detecting Malicious Websites from the Perspective of System Provenance Analysis

Malicious websites are considered one of the top threats to the modern Internet. Thus, it is critical to effectively detect malicious websites for the security of the Internet. Conventional technologies typically rely on URL blacklists, or static and dynamic code analysis, which are known to have limitations. In order to effectively detect malicious websites, in this paper, we study malicious websites from the perspective of system provenance analysis for the first time. We first conduct a systematic feature engineering study on thousands of benign and malicious websites from the perspective of system provenance data. In our study, we discover eight useful features for malicious website detection. Based on these eight features, we propose ProvWeb, a novel non-intrusive system provenance-based tool, for malicious website detection. In our evaluation, ProvWeb can achieve an F1 score of 93.7% ∼ 99.7% for the four combinations of browsers and OSes (Windows Chrome, Windows Firefox, Linux Chrome, Linux Firefox). This result confirms that the features discovered in provenance graphs are effective in detecting malicious websites.