Giuliano Antoniol

Polytechnique Montréal · DGIGL

The paper "Getting the Most from Map Data Structures in Android" has been presented at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA. The presentation itself was on November 7 as part of the conference’s combined research and journal-...

A map is a data structure that is commonly used to store data as key--value pairs and retrieve data as keys, values, or key--value pairs. Although Java offers different map implementation classes, Android SDK offers other implementations supposed to be more efficient than HashMap: ArrayMap and SparseArray variants (SparseArray, LongSparseArray, Spa...

Anti-patterns are poor solutions to design problems that make software systems hard to understand and to extend. Components involved in anti-patterns are reported to be consistently related to high changes and faults rates. Developers are advised to perform refactoring to remove anti-patterns, and consequently improve software design quality and re...

Ouni et al. “Maintainability defects detection and correction: a multi-objective approach” proposed a search-based approach for generating optimal refactoring sequences. They estimated the size of the search space for the refactoring scheduling problem using a formulation that is incorrect; the search space is estimated to be too much larger than i...

Interaction traces (ITs) are developers’ logs collected while developers maintain or evolve software systems. Researchers use ITs to study developers’ editing styles and recommend relevant program entities when developers perform changes on source code. However, when using ITs, they make assumptions that may not necessarily be true. This article as...

Context:Regression Test case Selection (RTS) approaches aim at selecting only those test cases of a test suite that exercise changed parts of the System Under Test (SUT) or parts affected by changes. Objective:We present SPIRITuS (SimPle Information Retrieval regressIon Test Selection approach). It uses method code coverage information and a Vector...

Regression testing is an important activity that can be expensive (e.g., for large test suites). Test suite reduction approaches speed up regression testing by removing redundant test cases. These approaches can be classified as adequate or inadequate. Adequate approaches reduce test suites so that they completely preserve the test requirements (e....

Deep neural networks is a popular technique that has been applied successfully to domains such as image processing , sentiment analysis, speech recognition, and computational linguistic. Deep neural networks are machine learning algorithms that, in general, require a labeled set of positive and negative examples that are used to tune hyper-paramete...

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving...

The fragile base-class problem (FBCP) has been described in the literature as a consequence of “misusing” inheritance and composition in object-oriented programming when (re)using frameworks. Many research works have focused on preventing the FBCP by proposing alternative mechanisms for reuse, but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous...

The energy consumption of mobile apps is a trending topic and researchers are actively investigating the role of coding practices on energy consumption. Recent studies suggest that design choices can conflict with energy consumption. Therefore, it is important to take into account energy consumption when evolving the design of a mobile app. In this...

Past and recent studies have shown that design smells which are poor solutions to recurrent design problems make object-oriented systems difficult to maintain, and that they negatively impact the class change- and fault-proneness. More recently, lexical smells have been introduced to capture recurring poor practices in the naming, documentation, an...

Combinatorial Interaction Testing is a black-box testing technique particularly used for highly configurable software systems, which involve a number of factors (and values) that can be combined, according to some constraints. In this context, constrained covering array (CCA) is a central combinatorial problem tasked with building a test suite of m...

The Android market is a place where developers offer paid and-or free apps to users. Free apps are interesting to users because they can try them immediately without incurring a monetary cost. However, free apps often have limited features and-or contain ads when compared to their paid counterparts. Thus, users may eventually need to pay to get add...

As this department celebrates its second year, its editors restate its mission and scope of interest, invite appropriate articles, and look at some previous contributions.

Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to access, code examples on Stack Overflow are governed by the Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported...

JavaScript is a powerful scripting programming language that has gained a lot of attention this past decade. Initially used exclusively for client-side web development, it has evolved to become one of the most popular programming languages, with developers now using it for both client-side and server-side application development. Similar to applica...

Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are free to access, code examples on Stack Overflow are governed by the Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported...

Frameworks are widely used in modern software development to reduce development costs. They are accessed through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which specify the contracts with client programs. When frameworks evolve, API backward-compatibility cannot always be guaranteed and client programs must upgrade to use the new releases. B...

The boom in mobile apps has changed the traditional landscape of software development by introducing new challenges due to the limited resources of mobile devices, e.g., memory, CPU, network bandwidth and battery. The energy consumption of mobile apps is nowadays a hot topic and researchers are actively investigating the role of coding practices on...

Several techniques are used by requirements engineering practitioners to address difficult problems such as specifying precise requirements while using inherently ambiguous natural language text and ensuring the consistency of requirements. Often, these problems are addressed by building processes/tools that combine multiple techniques where the ou...

We briefly introduce some approaches to help mobile device users and developers to choose and develop, respectively, efficient applications. This talk was given after an introduction to sustainable software development. After this and other presentations, students followed hands-on lectures and labs on the challenges of collecting and analysing ene...

This technical briefing presents the state of the art Text Retrieval and Natural Language Processing techniques used in Software Engineering and discusses their applications in the field.

Anti-patterns are poor solutions to design problems that make software systems hard to understand and extend. Entities involved in anti-patterns are reported to be consistently related to high change and fault rates. Refactorings, which are behavior preserving changes are often performed to remove anti-patterns from software systems. Developers are...

In this paper, we present a recommendation system aimed at helping users and developers alike. We help users to choose optimal sets of applications belonging to different categories (\eg browsers, e-mails, cameras) while minimizing energy consumption, transmitted data, and maximizing application rating. We also help developers by showing the relati...

Anti-patterns are poor design choices that hinder code evolution, and understandability. Practitioners perform refactoring, that are semantic-preserving-code transformations, to correct anti-patterns and to improve design quality. However, manual refactoring is a consuming task and a heavy burden for developers who have to struggle to complete thei...

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications. The user wishes to access fast and powerful mobile applications, which is usually in contrast to optimized battery life and heat generation. The software engineering community have acknowledged the relevance of the problem and researchers are investigating ways...

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications. The user wishes to access fast and powerful mobile applications, which is usually in contrast to optimized battery life and heat generation. The software engineering community have acknowledged the relevance of the problem and researchers are investigating ways...

Energy consumption is a major concern when developing and evolving mobile applications and researchers are investigating ways to reduce energy consumption. We conjecture that these studies are at the border between hardware and software and we must be careful on how the energy consumption is measured. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work...

PHP is by far the most popular WEB scripting language, accounting for more than 80% of existing websites. PHP is dynamically typed, which means that variables take on the type of the objects that they are assigned, and may change type as execution proceeds. While some type changes are likely not harmful, others involving function calls and global v...

Code reviews have been conducted since decades in software projects, with the aim of improving code quality from many different points of view. During code reviews, developers are supported by checklists, coding standards and, possibly, by various kinds of static analysis tools. This paper investigates whether warnings highlighted by static analysi...

Antipatterns are known as poor solutions to recurring problems. For example, Brown et al. and Fowler define practices concerning poor design or implementation solutions. However, we know that the source code lexicon is part of the factors that affect the psychological complexity of a program, i.e., factors that make a program difficult to understan...

Modern software uses frameworks through their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Framework APIs may change while frameworks evolve. Client programs have to upgrade to new releases of frameworks if security vulnerabilities are discovered in the used releases. Patching security vulnerabilities can be delayed by non-security-related API change...

Recent and past studies indicate that source code lexicon plays an important role in program comprehension. Developers often compose source code identifiers with abbreviated words and acronyms, and do not always use consistent mechanisms and explicit separators when creating identifiers. Such choices and inconsistencies impede the work of developer...

Program comprehension is a prerequisite to any maintenance and evolution task. In particular, when performing feature location, developers perform program comprehension by abstracting software features and identifying the links between high-level abstractions (features) and program elements. We present SCAN (Segment Concept AssigNer), an approach t...

Written communications recorded through chan-nels such as mailing lists or issue trackers, but also code co-changes, have been used to identify emerging collaborations in software projects. Also, such data has been used to identify the relation between developers' roles in communication networks and source code changes, or to identify mentors aidin...

Software frameworks keep evolving. It is often time-consuming for developers to keep their client code up-to-date. Not all frameworks have documentation about the upgrading process. Many approaches have been proposed to ease the impact of non-documented framework evolution on developers by identifying change rules between two releases of a framewor...

The large success of Content management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress is largely due to the rich ecosystem of themes and plugins developed around the CMS that allows users to easily build and customize complex Web applications featuring photo galleries, contact forms, and blog pages. However, the design of the CMS, the plugin-based architecture,...

Source code lexicon plays a paramount role in software quality: poor lexicon can lead to poor comprehensibility and even increase software fault-proneness. For this reason, renaming a program entity, i.e., altering the entity identifier, is an important activity during software evolution. Developers rename when they feel that the name of an entity...

Requirements Traceability (RT) links help developers during program comprehension and maintenance tasks. However, creating RT links is a laborious and resource-consuming task. Information Retrieval (IR) techniques are useful to automatically create traceability links. However, IR-based techniques typically have low accuracy (precision, recall, or b...

In this paper, we investigate heuristics for Approximate Graph Matching (AGM), in particular when it can be formulated as a Maximum Common Edge Subgraph (MCES) problem. First, we observe empirically that initializing a local search with a tiny subset of a known optimal solution always results in much better solutions than starting with an empty sol...

Extract Class refactoring (ECR) is used to divide large classes with low cohesion into smaller, more cohesive classes. However, splitting a class might result in increased coupling in the system due to new dependencies between the extracted classes. Thus, ECR requires that a software engineer identifies a trade off between cohesion and coupling. Su...

Program comprehension is an essential part of any maintenance activity. It allows developers to build mental models of the program before undertaking any change. It has been studied by the research community for many years with the aim to devise models and tools to understand and ease this activity. Recently, researchers have introduced the use of...

Software maintenance accounts for the largest part of the costs of any program. During maintenance activities, developers implement changes (sometimes simultaneously) on artifacts in order to fix bugs and to implement new requirements. To reduce this part of the costs, previous work proposed approaches to identify the artifacts of programs that cha...

For many years, researchers and practitioners have strived to assess and improve the productivity of software development teams. One key step toward achieving this goal is the understanding of factors affecting the efficiency of developers performing development and maintenance activities. In this paper, we aim to understand how developers' spend t...

When developers perform a maintenance task, they follow an exploration strategy (ES) that is characterised by how they navigate through the program entities. Studying ES can help to assess how developers understand a program and perform a change task. Various factors could influence how developers explore a program and the way in which they explore...

This paper reports the results and some challenges we discovered during the design and execution of a pilot experiment with 21 bachelor students aimed at investigating the effect of documentation accuracy during software maintenance and evolution activities. As documentation we considered: a high level system functionality description and UML docum...

Increased insulin-like growth factor (igf) signalling has been observed in breast cancer, including endocrine-responsive cancers, and has been linked to disease progression and recurrence. In particular, igf-1 has the ability to induce and promote lymphangiogenesis through the induction of vascular endothelial growth factor C (vegfc). In the presen...

Matching algorithms play a fundamental role in many important but difficult software engineering activities, especially design evolution analysis and model comparison. We present MADMatch, a fast and scalable many-to-many approximate diagram matching approach based on an error-tolerant graph matching (ETGM) formulation. Diagrams are represented as...

SUMMARY The software engineering literature reports empirical evidence on the relation between various characteristics of a software system and its quality. Among other factors, recent studies have shown that a proper choice of identifiers influences understandability and maintainability. Indeed, identifiers are developers' main source of informati...

Traceability is the only means to ensure that the source code of a system is consistent with its requirements and that all and only the specified requirements have been implemented by developers. During software maintenance and evolution, requirement traceability links become obsolete because developers do not/cannot devote effort to updating them....

Graphical representations are used to visualise, specify, and document software artifacts in all stages of software development process. In contrast with text, graphical representations are presented in two-dimensional form, which seems easy to process. However, few empirical studies investigated the efficiency of graphical representations vs. text...

Recent and past studies have shown that poor source code lexicon negatively affects software understandabil- ity, maintainability, and, overall, quality. Besides a poor usage of lexicon and documentation, sometimes a software artifact description is misleading with respect to its implementation. Consequently, developers will spend more time and eff...

Antipatterns are known as recurring, poor design choices, recent and past studies indicated that they negatively affect software systems in terms of understand ability and maintainability, also increasing change-and defect-proneness. For this reason, refactoring actions are often suggested. In this paper, we investigate a different side-effect of a...

SUMMARY Analyzing and understanding the evolution of large object-oriented software systems is an important but difficult task in which matching algorithms play a fundamental role. An error-tolerant graph matching (ETGM) algorithm can identify evolving classes that maintain a stable structure of relations (associations, inheritances, and aggregatio...

Understanding source code identifiers, by identifying words composing them, is a necessary step for many program comprehension, reverse engineering, or redocumentation tasks. To this aim, researchers have proposed several identifier splitting and expansion approaches such as Samurai, TIDIER and more recently GenTest. The ultimate goal of such appro...

Identifying concepts in execution traces is a task often necessary to support program comprehension or maintenance activities. Several approaches -- static, dynamic or hybrid -- have been proposed to identify cohesive, meaningful sequence of methods in execution traces. However, none of the proposed approaches is able to label such segments and to...

In software development, early identification of fault-prone classes can save a considerable amount of resources. In the literature, source code structural metrics have been widely investigated as one of the factors that can be used to identify faulty classes. Structural metrics measure code complexity, one aspect of the source code quality. Comple...

This chapter seeks to provide a reference resource on traceability fundamentals. It defines the essential traceability terminology of trace, trace artifact, trace link, traceability and tracing, and is supplemented by an extensive glossary that has been developed and endorsed by members of the traceability community. This chapter also offers a mode...

This chapter offers a vision for traceability in software and systems engineering and outlines eight challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve it. One of these challenges is referred to as the grand challenge of traceability because making traceability ubiquitous in software and systems development (traceability challenge eight) dema...

In requirement engineering, researchers have proposed various tractability recovery approaches. To the best of our knowledge, all traceability recovery approaches have low precision and recall. Our main claim in this chapter is that there exist factors that impact the traceability approaches' inputs, in particular source document, target document,...

Developers may introduce anti-patterns in their software systems because of time pressure, lack of understanding, communication, and--or skills. Anti-patterns impede development and maintenance activities by making the source code more difficult to understand. Detecting anti-patterns in a whole software system may be infeasible because of the requi...

Managing and controlling interference conditions in multi-threaded programs has been an issue of worry for application developers for a long time. Typically, when write events from two concurrent threads to the same shared variable are not properly protected, an occurrence of the interference bug pattern could be exposed. We propose a mathematical...