International Conference On Software Engineering Research Articles

Summary of the Fourth International Workshop on Deep Learning for Testing and Testing for Deep Learning (DeepTest 2023)

Deep Learning (DL) techniques help software developers thanks to their ability to learn from historical information which is useful in several program analysis and testing tasks (e.g., malware detection, fuzz testing, bug-finding, and type-checking). DL-based software systems are also increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains, such as autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, and aircraft collision avoidance systems. In particular, testing the correctness and reliability of DL-based systems is paramount, since a failure of such systems would cause a significant safety risk for the involved people and/or environment. The 4th International Workshop on Deep Learning for Testing and Testing for Deep Learning (DeepTest 2023) was co-located with the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), with the goal of targeting research at the intersection of software engineering and deep learning and devise novel approaches and tools to ensure the interpretability and dependability of software systems that depends on DL components.

Summary of the Tenth International Workshop on EyeMovements in Programming (EMIP 2022)

The study of eye movements in programming has many implications to software engineering and computing education in industry and academia. The 10th International Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP 2022) was co-located with the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), with the goal to further develop the methodology of using eye tracking for programming and software engineering, both theoretically and in practice.

Summary of the 1st Natural Language-based Software Engineering Workshop (NLBSE 2022)

Natural language processing (NLP) refers to automatic computa- tional processing of human language, including both algorithms that take human-produced text as input and algorithms that pro- duce natural-looking text as outputs. There is a widespread and growing usage of NLP approaches to optimize many aspects of the development process of software systems. In particular, since natural language artifacts are used and reused during the software development lifecycle, the availability of natural language-based approaches and tools enabled the envisioning of methods for im- proving efficiency in software engineers, processes, and products. The research community has been discussing these approaches in the 1st edition of the Natural Language-Based Software Engineer- ing Workshop (NLBSE), collocated with ICSE (the International Conference on Software Engineering) in 2022. This event brought together researchers and industrial practitioners from NLP and the software engineering community to share experiences, pro- vide directions for future research, and encourage the usage of NLP techniques and tools for addressing software engineering- speci c challenges. In this paper, we present a summary of the 1st edition of the workshop, which comprised ve full papers, four short/position papers, ve tool competition/demonstration pa- pers, one keynote (\Deep Learning & Software Engineering: Past, Present and Future"by Denys Poshyvanyk), followed by extensive discussion among NLBSE participants. More details can be found at https://nlbse2022.github.io/index.html

Fuzzing vs SBST

Search-Based Software Testing (SBST) is the application of SBSE for solving hard software testing problems. SBST has been the subject of discussion of our International SBST Workshop, colocated with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). In 2022 we hosted the 15th edition of our SBSTWorkshop, which brought together researchers and industrial practitioners to encourage the use of search-based and fuzz testing techniques and tools for addressing software engineering-specific challenges. In this 2022 edition, SBST held, among other exciting events, a discussion panel on the similarities and differences between SBST and Fuzzing. As it implies, the goal of the panel was to have a common ground for discussion on the main similarities and differences between the Fuzzing and SBST fields, focusing on how both communities can collaborate to advance the stateof- the-art on automated testing. This strong panel composed of researchers from both academia and industry was the highlight of SBST'22 and allowed the chairs of the workshop to make substantial changes for 2023. In this paper, we present the main take away messages from that seminal panel and highlight exciting new challenges in the field.

Summary of the Third International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE 2021)

Bots automate tasks in software engineering projects and interact with software developers. Bots have been proposed, for example, for testing, maintenance, and automating bug fixes. The research community has been discussing these bots in the International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), collocated with ICSE (the International Conference on Software Engineering). The workshop participants share experiences and challenges, discuss new usages of bots, and map out future directions. In this paper, we present a summary of the 3rd edition of the workshop, which comprised nine papers, one journal-first presentation, and two keynotes, followed by extensive discussion. More details can be found at http://botse.org/

Automated authoring, onboarding developers, and extracting decision rationale [Practitioners’ Digest

The "Practitioners’ Digest" department in this issue of IEEE Software includes papers from the 2021 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Feedback or suggestions are welcome. In addition, if you try or adopt any of the practices included in this article, please send me and the authors of the paper(s) a note about your experiences.

Publish or perish, but do not forget your software artifacts

Open-science initiatives have gained substantial momentum in computer science, and particularly in software-engineering research. A critical aspect of open-science is the public availability of artifacts (e.g., tools), which facilitates the replication, reproduction, extension, and verification of results. While we experienced that many artifacts are not publicly available, we are not aware of empirical evidence supporting this subjective claim. In this article, we report an empirical study on software artifact papers (SAPs) published at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), in which we investigated whether and how researchers have published their software artifacts, and whether this had scientific impact. Our dataset comprises 789 ICSE research track papers, including 604 SAPs (76.6 %), from the years 2007 to 2017. While showing a positive trend towards artifact availability, our results are still sobering. Even in 2017, only 58.5 % of the papers that stated to have developed a software artifact made that artifact publicly available. As we did find a small, but statistically significant, positive correlation between linking to artifacts in a paper and its scientific impact in terms of citations, we hope to motivate the research community to share more artifacts. With our insights, we aim to support the advancement of open science by discussing our results in the context of existing initiatives and guidelines. In particular, our findings advocate the need for clearly communicating artifacts and the use of non-commercial, persistent archives to provide replication packages.

Report on the 2nd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering (RoSE'19)

The 2nd edition of the 2nd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering (RoSE) was held at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in the city of Montreal, Canada, on the 27th of May 2019. The focus of this edition of the workshop was on multi-robot systems and facilitating robot programming. In this report, we rst present an overview of the workshop sessions before we highlight challenges identi ed in workshop's interactive discussion sessions.

Gender in Software Engineering

The topic of gender in software engineering received significant attention during the most recent International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Papers related to gender appeared in the main research track, the Software Engineering in Society (SEIS) track, and the second Gender Equity (GE) workshop (https://sites.google.com/view/ge-icse2019). Three of the papers summarized in this column are coauthored by the column authors.

Highlights from ICSE 2019: Software Security and Mobile App Energy Consumption

This issue's Practitioners' Digest department reports on the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). We focus on two emerging themes: security and energy issues for mobile apps. Feedback or suggestions are welcome. In addition, if you try or adopt any of the practices included in this article, please send me and the author(s) of the article a note about your experiences.

ICSSP 2018—Special issue introduction

AbstractThe International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, May 26 to 27, 2018, colocated with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying “Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand” by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both well‐developed plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model‐based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise‐level architectures. This special issue includes the revised and extended versions of the five highest ranked full research papers and industry experience papers of ICSSP 2018, including the two award‐winning papers.

Summary of the International Conference on Software andSystem Processes (ICSSP 2018)

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the eld of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 May 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying \Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both well-developed plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed these issues across di erent domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

Summary of the International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP 2018)

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 May 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying \Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both welldeveloped plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed these issues across different domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

Summary of the International Conference on Software andSystem Processes (ICSSP 2018)

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 May 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying \Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both welldeveloped plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed these issues across different domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

A community’s perspective on the status and future of peer review in software engineering

Context:Pre-publication peer review of scientific articles is considered a key element of the research process in software engineering, yet it is often perceived as not to work fully well.Objective:We aim at understanding the perceptions of and attitudes towards peer review of authors and reviewers at one of software engineering’s most prestigious venues, the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).Method:We invited 932 ICSE 2014/15/16 authors and reviewers to participate in a survey with 10 closed and 9 open questions.Results:We present a multitude of results, such as: Respondents perceive only one third of all reviews to be good, yet one third as useless or misleading; they propose double-blind or zero-blind reviewing regimes for improvement; they would like to see showable proofs of (good) reviewing work be introduced; attitude change trends are weak.Conclusion:The perception of the current state of software engineering peer review is fairly negative. Also, we found hardly any trend that suggests reviewing will improve by itself over time; the community will have to make explicit efforts. Fortunately, our (mostly senior) respondents appear more open for trying different peer reviewing regimes than we had expected.

Summary of the International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP 2016)

The International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2016 was held in Austin, Texas, from 14-15 May 2016, co-located with the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of mICSSP 2016 was studying \Process(es) in Action" by recognizing that the AS-Planned and AS-Practiced processes can be quite different in many ways including their ows, their complexity and the evolving needs of stakeholders. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed this issue addressing different domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

A Summary on the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015)

This summary reports on three separate events, the main conference and two co-located workshops, which were held at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2015 in Florence. The workshops are the third international workshop on RELeng ENGineering (RELENG) and the first international workshop on Complex faUlts and Failures in LargE Software Systems (COUFLESS). This summary reports on discussions held and highlights some observations made during these events.

How to Develop a General Theory of Software Engineering

Many academic disciplines have general theories, which apply across the discipline and explain diverse phenomena. General theories facilitate developing a cumulative body of knowledge, increase a field's resistance to fads and pseudoscience, and help us respond to novel situations where old heuristics break down. The goal of the SEMAT General Theory of Software Engineering (GTSE) workshop is therefore to promote developing and testing general theories for software engineering. The Third GTSE workshop was co-located with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2014. Participants explored different types of theories and how to assemble them into a framework. Participants debated how to make theories practical to practitioners and agreed that different types of practitioners (e.g. developers) have different needs for theories.

Foreword to the invited impact paper on automatic software repair

The authors of this paper, Claire Le Goues, Stephanie Forrest and Westley Weimer, have been at the forefront of developments in automated software patching (also known as automated software repair). Their approach uses genetic programming, a search-based algorithm, in order to search for patches which fix software systems. The invited impact paper presented in this issue of the journal will serve as a useful introduction to the area for those new to automated software repair and a roadmap for future work for those actively engaged in the topic. Impact papers are invited submissions to the journal, and they are reviewed speedily. An invited paper covers work that has already demonstrated an impact on the development of research, and so the review process starts from the presumption that the paper will ultimately be accepted. However, papers are reviewed by several expert reviewers (as normal), and authors are requested to respond to these reviewers’ comments (as has happened in the case of this paper). The authors’ work on automated repair is well known and highly cited and has undoubtedly already had an impact on the direction of research work, both for work on search-based software engineering (SBSE) and also on work on automated software repair. It has received a distinguished paper award at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) and also the gold medal for human competitive results at the genetic and evolutionary computation conference (GECCO). It was therefore felt timely and appropriate that the authors be invited to submit an impact paper to the Journal. This invited impact paper provides a survey of existing results in automated software repair, together with directions for future research in this area of SBSE. The results that have been achieved hitherto are, indeed, impressive, and we can look forward to a very bright future for this exciting and important area of research. I am confident that the reader will gain a great deal from this paper, whether or not they start out from a position of interest in either SBSE or automated software repair and so I commend the paper to the reader.

Evaluation studies of software testing research in Brazil and in the world: A survey of two premier software engineering conferences

This paper reports on a historical perspective of the evaluation studies present in software testing research published in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) in comparison to the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The survey characterizes the software testing-related papers published in the 25-year history of SBES, investigates the types of evaluation presented in these publications, and how the rate of evaluations has evolved over the years. A similar analysis within the same period is made for ICSE, allowing for a comparison between the national and international scenario. Results show that the rate of papers that present evaluation studies in SBES has significantly increased over the years. However, among the papers that described some kind of evaluation, only around 20% performed more rigorous evaluations (i.e. case studies, quasi experiments, or controlled experiments). Such percentage is low when compared to ICSE, which presented 40% of papers with more rigorous evaluations within the same period. Nevertheless, we noticed that both venues still lack the publication of research reporting controlled experiments: only a single paper in each conference presented this type of evaluation.