Tobias Roehm

Technische Universität München | TUM · Faculty of Informatics

The outcome and quality of design decisions highly depend on the knowledge reflected during decision-making. Typically, making design decisions is not one singular action.Instead, developers discuss and cooperate during requirements engineering, design and implementation of a system to make and adapt design decisions. This decision-making process i...

Software developers make various decisions when implementing software. For instance, they decide on how to implement an algorithm most efficiently or in which way to process user input. When code is revisited during maintenance , the underlying decisions need to be understood and possibly adjusted to the current situation. Common documentation appr...

Bug reports submitted by users and crash reports collected by crash reporting tools often lack information about reproduction steps, i.e. the steps necessary to reproduce a failure. Hence, developers have difficulties to reproduce field failures and might not be able to fix all reported bugs.

Research in program comprehension has evolved considerably over the past decades. However, only little is known about how developers practice program comprehension in their daily work. This article reports on qualitative and quantitative research to comprehend the strategies, tools, and knowledge used for program comprehension. We observed 28 profe...

Security issues can have a significant negative impact on the business or reputation of an organization. In most cases they are not identified in requirements and are not continuously monitored during software evolution. Therefore, the inability of a system to conform to regulations or its endangerment by new vulnerabilities is not recognized. In c...

Bug reports seldom contain information about the steps to reproduce a failure. Therefore, failure reproduction is a time consuming, difficult, and sometimes impossible task for software developers. Users are either unaware of the importance of steps to reproduce, are unable to describe them, or do not have time to report them. Similarly, automated...

This problem statement describes the lack of effective methodologies and tool support for documenting decision knowledge during software evolution. After a brief description and definition of decisions in software evolution, we outline the current mismatch between the need for decision documentation and the effort required for documentation.

Support of end-user needs is an important success factor for a software application. In order to optimize the support of end-user needs, developers have to be aware of them and their evolution over time. But a communication gap between developers and users leads to ignorance of developers about how users use their application. Also, developer assum...

The first step to comprehend and fix a software bug is usually to reproduce the corresponding failure. Reproducing a failure requires information about steps to reproduce, i.e. the steps necessary to make a failure occur in the development environment. In case of an application with a user interface, steps to reproduce consist of the interactions b...

Program comprehension as a subtask of software maintenance and evolution consumes about half of the time spent by the developers who have to explore a systems' source code to find and understand the sub-set of the code which is relevant to their current task. The problems encountered during the comprehension process influence the time spent on prog...

Software maintenance and support services are key factors to the customer perception of software product quality. The overall goal of FastFix is to provide developers with a real-time maintenance environment that increases efficiency and reduces costs, improving accuracy in identification of failure causes and facilitating their resolution. To achi...

Detecting the current activity of developers and problems they are facing is a prerequisite for a context-aware assistance and for capturing developers' experiences during their work. We present an approach to detect the current activity of software developers and if they are facing a problem. By observing developer actions like changing code or se...

Research in program comprehension has considerably evolved over the past two decades. However, only little is known about how developers practice program comprehension under time and project pressure, and which methods and tools proposed by researchers are used in industry. This paper reports on an observational study of 28 professional developers...

There is a semantic gap between simple but high-level action instructions like “Pick up the cup with the right hand” and low-level robot descriptions that model, for example, the structure and kinematics of a robot's manipulator. Currently, programmers bridge this gap by mapping abstract instructions to parametrized algorithms and rigid body parts...