The adoption of refactoring techniques for continuous integration received much less attention from the research community comparing to root-canal refactoring to fix the quality issues in the whole system. Several recent empirical studies show that developers, in practice, are applying refactoring incrementally when they are fixing bugs or adding new features. There is an urgent need for refactoring tools that can support continuous integration and some recent development processes such DevOps that are based on rapid releases.

In this paper, we propose for the first time an intelligent software refactoring bot, called RefBot. Integrated into the version control system (e.g. GitHub), our bot continuously monitors the software repository and it is triggered by any open or merge actions on pull-requests. The bot analyzes the files changed during that pull-request to identify refactoring opportunities using a set of quality attributes then it will find the best sequence of refactorings to fix the quality issues, if any. The bot recommends all these refactorings through an automatically generated pull-request. The developer is able to review the recommendations and their impacts in a detailed report and select the code changes that he wants to keep or ignore. After this review, the developer can close and approve the merge of the bot’s pull request. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated the performance and effectiveness of RefBot by a survey conducted with experienced developers who used the bot.

Vahid Alizadeh

University of Michigan

Mohamed Amine Ouali

University of Michigan

Marouane Kessentini

University of Michigan

United States

Meriem Chater

University of Michigan

Reactive programming languages and libraries, such as ReactiveX, have been shown to significantly improve software design and have seen important industrial adoption over the last years. Asynchronous applications – which are notoriously error-prone to implement and to maintain – greatly benefit from reactive programming because they can be defined in a declarative style, which improves code clarity and extensibility.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of refactoring existing code bases that are designed using traditional abstractions for asynchronous programming. We propose 2Rx, a refactoring tool to automatically convert asynchronous code to reactive programming. Our evaluation on top-starred GitHub projects shows that 2Rx is effective with the most common asynchronous constructs, covering ~94.7% of the projects with asynchronous computations, and it can provide a refactoring for ~91.7% of their occurrences.

Mirko Köhler

Technische Universität Darmstadt

Guido Salvaneschi

Technische Universität Darmstadt

Software delivery has seen many shifts, first from single sourcing to multi-vendor global delivery, and onward to crowd-sourced development. Development also increasingly incorporates reusable software components, including open source components, to support an “assemble more, code less” philosophy. As centralized control disperses out to autonomous delivery organizations, the variety of processes and tools used turns transparency into opacity as autonomous teams use different software processes, tools, and metrics, leading to issues like ineffective compliance monitoring, friction prone coordination, and lack of provenance. At Accenture Labs, we conceptualized delivery governance tools that use a notion of ‘software telemetry’ and distributed ledgers to record data from disparate delivery partners in a trusted manner. The tools use smart contracts for automatic enforcement of delivery policies. Furthermore, we use the concept of intelligence augmentation and “smart advisors” to provide role-specific alerts, contextual awareness and remediation actions. In this talk, we will present the conceptual architecture for a trusted software supply chain, illustrative use-cases and demonstration of a proof of concept on automated compliance monitoring, software integrity, and provenance.

Kapil Singi

Accenture

R.P. Jagadeesh Chandra Bose

Accenture Labs

Sanjay Podder

Accenture

India

Adam P. Burden

Accenture

For delivering high quality artifacts within the budget and on schedule, software delivery teams ideally should have a holistic and in-process view of the current health and future trajectory of the project. However, such insights need to be at the right level of granularity and need to be derived typically from a heterogeneous project environment, in a way that helps development team members with their tasks at hand. Due to client mandates, software delivery project environments employ many disparate tools and teams tend to be distributed, thus making the relevant information retrieval, insight generation, and developer intelligence augmentation fairly complex. In this talk we discuss our journey in this area spanning across facets like software project modelling and new development metrics, studying developer priorities, adoption of new metrics, and different approaches of developer intelligence augmentation. We end the talk presenting our exploration of new immersive technologies for human-centered software engineering.

Vibhu Saujanya Sharma

Accenture Labs

Rohit Mehra

Accenture Labs, India

India

Sanjay Podder

Accenture

India

Adam P. Burden

Accenture

We present Prema, a tool for Precise Requirement Editing, Modeling and Analysis. It can be used in various fields for describing precise requirements using formal notations and performing rigorous analysis. By parsing the requirements written in formal modeling language, Prema is able to get a model which aptly depicts the requirements. It also provides different rigorous verification and validation techniques to check whether the requirements meet users’ expectation and find potential errors. We show that our tool can provide a unified environment for writing and verifying requirements without using tools that are not well inter-related. For experimental demonstration, we use the requirements of the automatic train protection (ATP) system of CASCO signal co. LTD., the largest railway signal control system manufacturer of China. The code of the tool cannot be released here because the project is commercially confidential. However, a demonstration video of the tool is available at https://youtu.be/BX0yv8pRMWs.

Yihao Huang

East China Normal University

Jincao Feng

East China Normal University

Hanyue Zheng

East China Normal University

Jiayi Zhu

East China Normal University

Shang Wang

East China Normal University

Siyuan Jiang

Eastern Michigan University

Weikai Miao

Shanghai Key Lab for Trustworthy Computing, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, East China Normal University

Geguang Pu

East China Normal University&Shanghai Trusted Industrial Control Platform Co., Ltd

A popular recommendation to programmers in object-oriented software is to “program to an interface, not an implementation” (PTI). Expected benefits include increased simplicity from abstraction, decreased dependency on implementations, and higher flexibility. Yet, interfaces must be immutable, excessive class hierarchies can be a form of complexity, and “speculative generality” is a known code smell. To advance the empirical knowledge of PTI, we conducted an empirical investigation that involves 126 Java projects on GitHub, aiming to measuring the decreased dependency benefits (in terms of cochange).

Benoît Verhaeghe

INRIA

Christopher Fuhrman

École de technologie supérieure

Canada

Nicolas Anquetil

INRIA

Latifa Guerrouj

École de Technologie Supérieure

Canada

Stéphane Ducasse

INRIA Lille