Alexander Egyed

Johannes Kepler University Linz | JKU · Institute for Software Systems Engineering

Bug localization is the task of recommending source code locations (typically files) that probably contain the cause of a bug and hence need to be changed to fix the bug. Along these lines, information retrieval-based bug localization (IRBL) approaches have been adopted, which identify the most bug-prone files from the source code space. In current...

A large number of bug reports are created during the evolution of a software system. Locating the source code files that need to be changed in order to fix these bugs is a challenging task. Information retrieval-based bug localization techniques do so by correlating bug reports with historical information about the source code (e.g., previously res...

Maintaining the consistency of engineering artifacts is a challenge faced by several engineering companies. This is more evident when the engineering artifacts are created using different tools and have different formats. This is the context of a company that builds agricultural machines, where components are developed using a decentralized iterati...

Products and production are inherently variable. That is, the products themselves often need to be variable—as in a car plant producing many similar, albeit not identical cars. Such flexibility allows a product to be more easily customizable. We speak of variable products. At the same time, production systems typically need to be flexible in suppor...

Loose coupling of system components on all levels of automated production systems enables vital systems-of-systems properties such as simplified composition, variability, testing, reuse, maintenance, and adaptation. All these are crucial aspects needed to realize highly flexible and adaptable production systems. Based on traditional software archit...

Software-intensive systems in general and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in particular have drawn considerable attention from both industry and academia in recent years, with companies increasingly adopting Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS). Regardless of the domain in which these systems are deployed, what they have in common is a shift from...

A unique selling point for cyber-physical production system manufacturers becomes the easy with which machines and cells can be adapted to new products and production processes. Adaptations, however, are often done by domain experts without in-depth programming know-how. We investigate in this paper, the implications of using a planning-based appro...

Traces are used to show whether a model complies with the intended behavior. A modeler can use trace checking to ensure the preservation of the model behavior during the refinement process. In this paper, we present a trace refinement technique and tool called BERT that allows designers to ensure the behavioral integrity of high-level traces at the...

Software systems are becoming increasingly configurable. A paradigmatic example is the Linux kernel, which can be adjusted for a tremendous variety of hardware devices, from mobile phones to supercomputers, thanks to the thousands of configurable features it supports. In principle, many relevant problems on configurable systems, such as completing...

In large code bases, locating the elements that implement concrete features of a system is challenging. This information is paramount for maintenance and evolution tasks, although not always explicitly available. In this work, motivated by the needs of locating features as a first step for feature-based Software Product Line adoption, we propose a...

Traceability approves trace links among software artifacts based on whether two artifacts are related by system functionalities. The traces are valuable for software development, but are difficult to obtain manually. To cope with the costly and fallible manual recovery, automated approaches are proposed to recover traces through textual similaritie...

Software companies commonly develop and maintain variants of systems, with different feature combinations for different customers. Thus, they must cope with variability in space. Software companies further must cope with variability in time, when updating system variants by revising existing software features. Inevitably, variants evolve orthogonal...

Traces are used to show whether a model complies with the intended behavior. A modeler can use trace checking to ensure the preservation of the model behavior during the refinement process. In this paper, we present a trace refinement technique and tool called BERT that allows designers to ensure the behavioral integrity of high-level traces at the...

In software development teams, developer turnover is among the primary reasons for project failures as it leads to a great void of knowledge and strain for the newcomers. Unfortunately, no established methods exist to measure how knowledge is distributed among development teams. Knowing how this knowledge evolves and is owned by key developers in a...

Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early in development to ensure their correctness. Furthermore, validation obligations help hold requirements consiste...

Repairing software models may be a laborious task, as the number of alternatives that must be considered by engineers can be large. This is more evident in collaborative environments, where the stream of changes applied to models by different engineers is constant and unanticipated. These changes can cause multiple inconsistencies that must be fixe...

This document lays out the foundations for VO and requirement refinement, abstractions of models, and instantiations. Also, VOs on abstractions and instantiations are considered.

This report discusses the foundations of the VO approach. Then, it explores multiple directions and argues about structure and applications.

This article presents a systematic mapping study on the model‐driven engineering of safety and security concerns in software systems. Combined modeling and development of both safety and security concerns is an emerging field of research as both concerns affect one another in unique ways. Our mapping study provides an overview of the current state...

Engineering projects involve a variety of artifacts such as requirements, design, or source code. These artifacts, many of which tend to be interdependent, are often manipulated concurrently. To keep artifacts consistent, engineers must continuously consider their work in relation to the work of multiple other engineers. Traditional consistency che...

There are many repair alternatives for resolving model inconsistencies, each involving one or more model changes. Enumerating them all could overwhelm the developer because the number of possible repairs can grow exponentially. To address this problem, this paper focuses on the immediate cause of an inconsistency. By focusing on the cause, we can g...

Traceability recovery captures trace links among different software artifacts (e.g., requirements and code) when two artifacts cover the same part of system functionalities. These trace links provide important support for developers in software maintenance and evolution tasks. Information Retrieval (IR) is now the mainstream technique for semi-auto...

Artificial intelligence and software engineering complement each other in various ways. This special issue highlights how this relationship is developing over time to address the challenges faced in modern-day computing.

Semantic clone detection is the process of finding program elements with similar or equal runtime behavior. For example, detecting the semantic equality between the recursive and iterative implementation of the factorial computation. Semantic clone detection is the de facto technical boundary of clone detectors. In recent years, this boundary has b...

Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early in development to ensure their correctness. Furthermore, validation obligations help hold requirements consiste...

The software engineering community is rapidly adopting machine learning for transitioning modern-day software towards highly intelligent and self-learning systems. However, the software engineering community is still discovering new ways how machine learning can offer help for various software development life cycle stages. In this article, we pres...

Feature annotation based on preprocessor directives is the most common mechanism in Highly-Configurable Software Systems (HCSSs) to manage variability. However, it is challenging to understand, maintain, and evolve feature fragments guarded by #ifdef directives. Yet, despite HCSSs being implemented in Version Control Systems, the support for evolvi...

Software Product Lines (SPLs) make it possible to configure a single system based on features in order to create many different variants and cater to a wide range of customers with varying requirements. This configuration space is often modeled using Feature Models (FMs). However, in practice, the SPL (and consequently the FM) is often created afte...

Studies over the past decade demonstrated that developers contributing to open source software systems tend to self-organize in "emerging" communities. This latent community structure has a significant impact on software quality. While several approaches address the analysis of developer interaction networks, the question of whether these emerging...

Developers change models with clear intentions—e.g., for refactoring, defects removal, or evolution. However, in doing so, developers are often unaware of the consequences of their changes. Changes to one part of a model may affect other parts of the same model and/or even other models, possibly created and maintained by other developers. The conse...

Consistency checking of interdependent heterogeneous engineering artifacts, such as requirements, specifications, and code, is a challenging task in large-scale engineering projects. The lack of team-oriented solutions allowing a multitude of project stakeholders to collaborate in a consistent manner is thus becoming a critical problem. In this con...

In this paper, we propose a recommendation approach -- TaskAllocator -- in order to predict the assignment of incoming tasks to potential befitting roles. The proposed approach, identifying team roles rather than individual persons, allows project managers to perform better tasks allocation in case the individual developers are over-utilized or mov...

Traditionally, practitioners use formal methods pre-dominately for one half of the quality-assurance process: verification (do we build the software right?). The other half -- validation (do we build the right software?) -- has been given comparatively little attention. While verification is the core of refinement-based formal methods, where each n...

Software models, often comprise of interconnected diagrams, change continuously, and developers often fail in keeping these diagrams consistent. Detecting inconsistencies quickly and efficiently is state of the art. However, repairing them is not trivial, because there are typically multiple model elements that need to be repaired, leading to an ex...

In model-driven engineering, sequence diagrams are commonly used to describe a system’s expected behavior in different scenarios. Indeed, the information flow described in sequence diagrams should actually take place during a real execution of the system in order to ensure its safety, security and correctness. If it does not, this may lead to serio...

Operating/maintaining a shop-floor and planning for the efficient utilization of said shop floor, are typically two different sides of a coin. While the operation side is focused on making the interaction between humans, machines and software run flawlessly (e.g. by utilizing orchestration software), the planning side is focused on finding the righ...

Software product lines (SPLs) are known for improving productivity and reducing time-to-market through the systematic reuse of assets. SPLs are adopted mainly by re-engineering existing system variants. Feature location techniques (FLTs) support the re-engineering process by mapping the variants' features to their implementation. However, such FLTs...

Dealing with highly configurable systems is generally very complex. Researchers and practitioners have conceived hundreds of different analysis techniques to deal with different aspects of configurable systems. One large focal point is the testing of configurable software. This is challenging due to the large number of possible configurations. More...

The new era of Industry 4.0 is leading towards self-learning and adaptable production systems requiring efficient and intelligent decision making. Achieving high production rate in a short span of time, continuous improvement, and better utilization of resources is crucial for such systems. This paper discusses an approach to achieve production opt...

Highly-Configurable Software Systems (HCSSs) support the systematic evolution of systems in space, i.e., the inclusion of new features, which then allow users to configure software products according to their needs. However, HCSSs also change over time, e.g., when adapting existing features to new hardware or platforms. In practice, HCSSs are thus...

Software companies encounter variability in space as variants of software systems need to be produced for different customers. At the same time, companies need to handle evolution in time because the customized variants need to be revised and kept up-to-date. This leads to a predicament in practice with many system variants significantly diverging...

Semantic clone detection is the process of finding program elements with similar or equal runtime behavior. For example, detecting the semantic equality between the recursive and iterative implementation of the factorial computation. Semantic clone detection is the de facto technical boundary of clone detectors. This boundary was tested over the la...

In today's engineering projects, companies continuously have to adapt their systems to changing customers or dynamic market requirements. This requires a flexible, iterative development process in which different parts of the system under construction are built and updated concurrently. However, concurrent engineering becomes quite challenging in d...