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Software Engineering

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preprint2016arXiv

An initial performance review of software components for a heterogeneous computing platform

The design of embedded systems is a complex activity that involves a lot of decisions. With high performance demands of present day usage scenarios and software, they often involve energy hungry state-of-the-art computing units. While focusing on power consumption of computing units, the physical properties of software are often ignored. Recently, there has been a growing interest to quantify and model the physical footprint of software (e.g. consumed power, generated heat, execution time, etc.), and a component based approach facilitates methods for describing such properties. Based on these, software architects can make energy-efficient software design solutions. This paper presents power consumption and execution time profiling of a component software that can be allocated on heterogeneous computing units (CPU, GPU, FPGA) of a tracked robot.

preprint2016arXiv

Model Driven Web Application Development With Agile Practices

Model driven development is an effective method due to its benefits such as code transformation, increasing productivity and reducing human based error possibilities. Meanwhile, agile software development increases the software flexibility and customer satisfaction by using iterative method. Can these two development approaches be combined to develop web applications efficiently? What are the challenges and what are the benefits of this approach? In this paper, we answer these two crucial problems; combining model driven development and agile software development results in not only fast development and easiness of the user interface design but also efficient job tracking. We also defined an agile model based approach for web applications whose implementation study has been carried out to support the answers we gave these two crucial problems.

preprint2016arXiv

SCALL: Software Component Allocator for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

Allocation of software components on a heterogeneous computing platform involves hard decisions; handling different types of computing units with specific processing paradigms and a number of software components which require specific resources. An allocation method which explores the design space to provide a system architect with deployment alternatives in an early design phase can have a significant impact on the utilization of underlying platform. In this paper we present SCALL, an early prototype tool which uses heuristics and AHP for weighted multi-objective design space exploration to support systems architects in complex allocation decisions in early design phases.

preprint2017arXiv

A Simulation Tool for tccp Programs

The Timed Concurrent Constraint Language tccp is a declarative synchronous concurrent language, particularly suitable for modelling reactive systems. In tccp, agents communicate and synchronise through a global constraint store. It supports a notion of discrete time that allows all non-blocked agents to proceed with their execution simultaneously. In this paper, we present a modular architecture for the simulation of tccp programs. The tool comprises three main components. First, a set of basic abstract instructions able to model the tccp agent behaviour, the memory model needed to manage the active agents and the state of the store during the execution. Second, the agent interpreter that executes the instructions of the current agent iteratively and calculates the new agents to be executed at the next time instant. Finally, the constraint solver components which are the modules that deal with constraints. In this paper, we describe the implementation of these components and present an example of a real system modelled in tccp.

preprint2016arXiv

Parichayana: An Eclipse Plugin for Detecting Exception Handling Anti-Patterns and Code Smells in Java Programs

Anti-patterns and code-smells are signs in the source code which are not defects (does not prevent the program from functioning and does not cause compile errors) and are rather indicators of deeper and bigger problems. Exception handling is a programming construct de- signed to handle the occurrence of anomalous or exceptional conditions (that changes the normal flow of program execution). In this paper, we present an Eclipse plug-in (called as Parichayana) for detecting exception handling anti-patterns and code smells in Java programs. Parichayana is capable of automatically detecting several commonly occurring excep- tion handling programming mistakes. We extend the Eclipse IDE and create new menu entries and associated action via the Parichayana plug- in (free and open-source hosted on GitHub). We compare and contrast Parichayana with several code smell detection tools and demonstrate that our tool provides unique capabilities in context to existing tools. We have created an update site and developers can use the Eclipse up- date manager to install Parichayana from our site. We used Parichyana on several large open-source Java based projects and detected presence of exception h

preprint2017arXiv

Proving Non-Deterministic Computations in Agda

We investigate proving properties of Curry programs using Agda. First, we address the functional correctness of Curry functions that, apart from some syntactic and semantic differences, are in the intersection of the two languages. Second, we use Agda to model non-deterministic functions with two distinct and competitive approaches incorporating the non-determinism. The first approach eliminates non-determinism by considering the set of all non-deterministic values produced by an application. The second approach encodes every non-deterministic choice that the application could perform. We consider our initial experiment a success. Although proving properties of programs is a notoriously difficult task, the functional logic paradigm does not seem to add any significant layer of difficulty or complexity to the task.

preprint2016arXiv

A Rigorous Framework for Specification, Analysis and Enforcement of Access Control Policies

Access control systems are widely used means for the protection of computing systems. They are defined in terms of access control policies regulating the accesses to system resources. In this paper, we introduce a formally-defined, fully-implemented framework for specification, analysis and enforcement of attribute-based access control policies. The framework rests on FACPL, a language with a compact, yet expressive, syntax for specification of real-world access control policies and with a rigorously defined denotational semantics. The framework enables the automatic verification of properties regarding both the authorisations enforced by single policies and the relationships among multiple policies. Effectiveness and performance of the analysis rely on a semantic-preserving representation of FACPL policies in terms of SMT formulae and on the use of efficient SMT solvers. Our analysis approach explicitly addresses some crucial aspects of policy evaluation, as e.g. missing attributes, erroneous values and obligations, which are instead overlooked in other proposals. The framework is supported by Java-based tools, among which an Eclipse- based IDE offering a tailored development and

preprint2017arXiv

On the Interaction of Relational Database Access Technologies in Open Source Java Projects

This article presents an empirical study of how the use of relational database access technologies in open source Java projects evolves over time. Our observations may be useful to project managers to make more informed decisions on which technologies to introduce into an existing project and when. We selected 2,457 Java projects on GitHub using the low-level JDBC technology and higher-level object relational mappings such as Hibernate XML configuration files and JPA annotations. At a coarse-grained level, we analysed the probability of introducing such technologies over time, as well as the likelihood that multiple technologies co-occur within the same project. At a fine-grained level, we analysed to which extent these different technologies are used within the same set of project files. We also explored how the introduction of a new database technology in a Java project impacts the use of existing ones. We observed that, contrary to what could have been expected, object-relational mapping technologies do not tend to replace existing ones but rather complement them.

preprint2016arXiv

Optimization of Test Case Generation using Genetic Algorithm (GA)

Testing provides means pertaining to assuring software performance. The total aim of software industry is actually to make a certain start associated with high quality software for the end user. However, associated with software testing has quite a few underlying concerns, which are very important and need to pay attention on these issues. These issues are effectively generating, prioritization of test cases, etc. These issues can be overcome by paying attention and focus. Solitary of the greatest Problems in the software testing area is usually how to acquire a great proper set associated with cases to confirm software. Some other strategies and also methodologies are proposed pertaining to shipping care of most of these issues. Genetic Algorithm (GA) belongs to evolutionary algorithms. Evolutionary algorithms have a significant role in the automatic test generation and many researchers are focusing on it. In this study explored software testing related issues by using the GA approach. In addition to right after applying some analysis, better solution produced, that is feasible and reliable. The particular research presents the implementation of GAs because of its generation of op

preprint2016arXiv

TDSelector: A Training Data Selection Method for Cross-Project Defect Prediction

In recent years, cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) attracted much attention and has been validated as a feasible way to address the problem of local data sparsity in newly created or inactive software projects. Unfortunately, the performance of CPDP is usually poor, and low quality training data selection has been regarded as a major obstacle to achieving better prediction results. To the best of our knowledge, most of existing approaches related to this topic are only based on instance similarity. Therefore, the objective of this work is to propose an improved training data selection method for CPDP that considers both similarity and the number of defects each training instance has (denoted by defects), which is referred to as TDSelector, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experiments were conducted on 14 projects (including 15 data sets) collected from two public repositories. The results indicate that, in a specific CPDP scenario, the TDSelector-based bug predictor performs, on average, better than those based on the baseline methods, and the AUC (area under ROC curve) values are increased by up to 10.6 and 4.3%, respectively. Besides, an addit

preprint2016arXiv

AZ Model for Software Development

Know a days Computer system become essential and it is most commonly used in every field of life. The computer saves time and use to solve complex and extensive problem quickly in an efficient way. For this purpose software programs are develop to facilitate the works for administrator, offices, banks etc. so Quality is the most important factor as it mostly defines CUSTOMER SATISFACTION which directly related to success of the project so there are many approaches (methodologies) have been developed for this purpose occasionally. The main study of this paper is to propose a new methodology for the development of the software which focuses on the quality improvement of all kind of product. This study will also discuss the features and limitation of the traditional methodologies like waterfall iterative spiral RUP and Agile and show how the new innovative methodology is better than previous one.

preprint2016arXiv

Resilience Design Patterns - A Structured Approach to Resilience at Extreme Scale (version 1.0)

In this document, we develop a structured approach to the management of HPC resilience based on the concept of resilience-based design patterns. A design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem. We identify the commonly occurring problems and solutions used to deal with faults, errors and failures in HPC systems. The catalog of resilience design patterns provides designers with reusable design elements. We define a design framework that enhances our understanding of the important constraints and opportunities for solutions deployed at various layers of the system stack. The framework may be used to establish mechanisms and interfaces to coordinate flexible fault management across hardware and software components. The framework also enables optimization of the cost-benefit trade-offs among performance, resilience, and power consumption. The overall goal of this work is to enable a systematic methodology for the design and evaluation of resilience technologies in extreme-scale HPC systems that keep scientific applications running to a correct solution in a timely and cost-efficient manner in spite of frequent faults, errors, and failures of various ty

preprint2016arXiv

Emerging Security Challenges of Cloud Virtual Infrastructure

The cloud computing model is rapidly transforming the IT landscape. Cloud computing is a new computing paradigm that delivers computing resources as a set of reliable and scalable internet-based services allowing customers to remotely run and manage these services. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is one of the popular cloud computing services. IaaS allows customers to increase their computing resources on the fly without investing in new hardware. IaaS adapts virtualization to enable on-demand access to a pool of virtual computing resources. Although there are great benefits to be gained from cloud computing, cloud computing also enables new categories of threats to be introduced. These threats are a result of the cloud virtual infrastructure complexity created by the adoption of the virtualization technology. Breaching the security of any component in the cloud virtual infrastructure significantly impacts on the security of other components and consequently affects the overall system security. This paper explores the security problem of the cloud platform virtual infrastructure identifying the existing security threats and the complexities of this virtual infrastructure. The pa

preprint2016arXiv

HADAS Green Assistant: designing energy-efficient applications

The number of works addressing the role of energy efficiency in the software development has been increasing recently. But, designers and programmers still complain about the lack of tools that help them to make energy-efficiency decisions. Some works show that energy-aware design decisions tend to have a larger impact in the power consumed by applications, than code optimizations. In this paper we present the HADAS green assistant, which helps developers to identify the energy-consuming concerns of their applications (i.e., points in the application that consume more energy, like storing or transferring data), and also to model, analyse and reason about different architectural solutions for each of these concerns. This tool models the variability of more or less green architectural practices and the dependencies between different energy-consuming concerns using variabilty models. Finally, this tool will automatically generate the architectural configuration derived from the selections made by the developer from an energy consumption point of view.

preprint2016arXiv

DroidGen: Constraint-based and Data-Driven Policy Generation for Android

We present DroidGen a tool for automatic anti-malware policy inference. DroidGen employs a data-driven approach: it uses a training set of malware and benign applications and makes call to a constraint solver to generate a policy under which a maximum of malware is excluded and a maximum of benign applications is allowed. Preliminary results are encouraging. We are able to automatically generate a policy which filters out 91% of the tested Android malware. Moreover, compared to black-box machine learning classifiers, our method has the advantage of generating policies in a declarative readable format. We illustrate our approach, describe its implementation and report on the preliminary results.

preprint2016arXiv

Mutation-driven Test Case Generation Using Short-lived Concurrent Mutants -- First Results

In the context of black-box testing, generating test cases through model mutation is known to produce powerful test suites but usually has the drawback of being prohibitively expensive. This paper presents a new version of the tool MoMuT::UML (www.momut.org), which implements a scalable version of mutation-driven test case generation (MDTCG). It is able to handle industrial-sized UML models comprising networks of, e.g., 2800 interacting state machines. To achieve the required scalability, the implemented algorithm exploits the concurrency in MDTCG and combines it with a search based generation strategy. For evaluation, we use seven case studies of different application domains with an increasing level of difficulty, stopping at a model of a railway station in Austria's national rail network.

preprint2016arXiv

A Light-Weight Approach for Verifying Multi-Threaded Programs with CPAchecker

Verifying multi-threaded programs is becoming more and more important, because of the strong trend to increase the number of processing units per CPU socket. We introduce a new configurable program analysis for verifying multi-threaded programs with a bounded number of threads. We present a simple and yet efficient implementation as component of the existing program-verification framework CPAchecker. While CPAchecker is already competitive on a large benchmark set of sequential verification tasks, our extension enhances the overall applicability of the framework. Our implementation of handling multiple threads is orthogonal to the abstract domain of the data-flow analysis, and thus, can be combined with several existing analyses in CPAchecker, like value analysis, interval analysis, and BDD analysis. The new analysis is modular and can be used, for example, to verify reachability properties as well as to detect deadlocks in the program. This paper includes an evaluation of the benefit of some optimization steps (e.g., changing the iteration order of the reachability algorithm or applying partial-order reduction) as well as the comparison with other state-of-the-art tools for verify

preprint2016arXiv

Development of UMLS Based Health Care Web Services for Android Platform

In this fast developing world of information, the amount of medical knowledge is rising at an exponential level. The UMLS (Unified Medical Language Systems), is rich knowledge base consisting files and software that provides many health and biomedical vocabularies and standards. A Web service is a web solution to facilitate machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Few UMLS web services are currently available for portable devices, but most of them lack in efficiency and performance. It is proposed to develop Android-based web services for healthcare systems underlying rich knowledge source of UMLS. The experimental evaluation was made to analyse the efficiency and performance effect with and without using the designed prototype. The understand-ability and interaction with the prototype were greater than those who used the alternate sources to obtain the answers to their questions. The overall performance indicates that the system is convenient and easy to use. The result of the evaluation clearly proved that designed system retrieves all the pertinent information better than syntactic searches.

preprint2016arXiv

A literature survey of the quality economics of defect-detection techniques

Over the last decades, a considerable amount of empirical knowledge about the efficiency of defect-detection techniques has been accumulated. Also a few surveys have summarised those studies with different focuses, usually for a specific type of technique. This work reviews the results of empirical studies and associates them with a model of software quality economics. This allows a better comparison of the different techniques and supports the application of the model in practice as several parameters can be approximated with typical average values. The main contributions are the provision of average values of several interesting quantities w.r.t. defect detection and the identification of areas that need further research because of the limited knowledge available.

preprint2016arXiv

Targeting Infeasibility Questions on Obfuscated Codes

Software deobfuscation is a crucial activity in security analysis and especially, in malware analysis. While standard static and dynamic approaches suffer from well-known shortcomings, Dynamic Symbolic Execution (DSE) has recently been proposed has an interesting alternative, more robust than static analysis and more complete than dynamic analysis. Yet, DSE addresses certain kinds of questions encountered by a reverser namely feasibility questions. Many issues arising during reverse, e.g. detecting protection schemes such as opaque predicates fall into the category of infeasibility questions. In this article, we present the Backward-Bounded DSE, a generic, precise, efficient and robust method for solving infeasibility questions. We demonstrate the benefit of the method for opaque predicates and call stack tampering, and give some insight for its usage for some other protection schemes. Especially, the technique has successfully been used on state-of-the-art packers as well as on the government-grade X-Tunnel malware -- allowing its entire deobfuscation. Backward-Bounded DSE does not supersede existing DSE approaches, but rather complements them by addressing infeasibility questions

preprint2016arXiv

Runtime enforcement of reactive systems using synchronous enforcers

Synchronous programming is a paradigm of choice for the design of safety-critical reactive systems. Runtime enforcement is a technique to ensure that the output of a black-box system satisfies some desired properties. This paper deals with the problem of runtime enforcement in the context of synchronous programs. We propose a framework where an enforcer monitors both the inputs and the outputs of a synchronous program and (minimally) edits erroneous inputs/outputs in order to guarantee that a given property holds. We define enforceability conditions, develop an online enforcement algorithm, and prove its correctness. We also report on an implementation of the algorithm on top of the KIELER framework for the SCCharts synchronous language. Experimental results show that enforcement has minimal execution time overhead, which decreases proportionally with larger benchmarks.

preprint2016arXiv

A Comprehensive Model of Usability

Usability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. Unfortunately, there is no common understanding of the factors influencing usability and their interrelations. Hence, the lack of a comprehensive basis for designing, analyzing, and improving user interfaces. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of usability that associates system properties with the activities carried out by the user. By separating activities and properties, sound quality criteria can be identified, thus facilitating statements concerning their interdependencies. This model is based on a tested quality meta-model that fosters preciseness and completeness. A case study demonstrates the manner by which such a model aids in revealing contradictions and omissions in existing usability standards. Furthermore, the model serves as a central and structured knowledge base for the entire quality assurance process, e.g. the automatic generation of guideline documents.

preprint2016arXiv

D-LITe: Building Internet of Things Choreographies

In this work, we present a complete architecture for designing Internet of Things applications. While a main issue in this domain is the heterogeneity of Objects hardware, networks and protocols, we propose D-LITe, a solution to hide this wide range of low layer technologies. By abstracting the hardware, we focus on object's features and not on its real characteristics. D-LITe aims to give a universal access to object's internal processing and computational power. A small virtual machine embedded in each object gives a universal view of its functionalities. Each object's features are discovered and programmed through the network, without any physical access. D-LITe comes with the SALT language that describes the logical behaviour needed to include user's Objects into an IoT application. This communication is based on REST architecture. Gathering all these logical units into a global composition is our way to build a services Choreography, in which each Object has its own task to achieve. This paper presents also an analysis of the gain obtained when a Choreography is used instead of the most common services.

preprint2016arXiv

Towards the Formalization of a Factory Demonstrator in BeSpaceD

This report gives an overview of our efforts towards a formalization for a food processing demonstrator plant. Our BeSpaceD framework is used for the formalization. The formalization comprises properties of components and relations between components. We present domain-specific constructs for the formalization of industrial automation facilities and provide some insights into the concrete food processing formalization. We are particularly interested in spatio-temporal and other physical characteristics. Relation- ships are formalized as graphs with annotated edges and components are represented as nodes.

535 works