Datasets are imperative to the development and progression of software tools, not only to facilitate a fair and unbiased evaluation of their effectiveness, but also to inspire and enable the community to advance the state of the art. In this talk, I will describe BugSwarm, an infrastructure that leverages continuous integration (CI) to automatically create a continuously growing dataset of reproducible failures and fixes. BugSwarm comprises an infrastructure, dataset, REST API, and website. The current dataset consists of 3,140 pairs of failures and fixes mined from Java and Python open-source projects. The talk will also discuss initial research studies that use the BugSwarm dataset, and future directions for the BugSwarm infrastructure.

Cindy Rubio-Gonzalez

University of California, Davis

Software engineers tend to document their systems’ architectures sporadically and superficially. Additionally, engineers frequently neglect to carefully consider the architectural impact of their changes to a system’s implementation. As a result, an existing system’s architecture will over time deviate from the engineers’ intent, and it will decay through unplanned introduction of new and/or invalidation of existing design decisions. Technical debt accumulates through architectural decay, increasing the cost of making modifications to a system and decreasing the system’s dependability. In this talk, I will introduce ARCADE, an integrated collection of tools for isolating three types of architectural information from the details readily available about a system’s implementation: architectural design decisions, change, and decay. I will show how ARCADE uses this information to identify the locations in a software system’s implementation that reflect the architectural decay, the points in a system’s lifetime when that decay tends to occur, and the reasons why it occurs. I will show how architectural decay tends to correlate with the occurrence of commonly reported implementation-level issues, and how it can be predicted. Finally, I will identify steps that engineers can take to manage the accumulated technical debt by stemming the decay. Data obtained by analyzing dozens of versions of several well-known systems - Android, Hadoop, Cassandra, Struts, etc. - will be used to illustrate the discussion throughout.

Nenad Medvidović

University of Southern California

United States

For large-scale mobile apps, software reliability is of critical importance. At the same time, developers need to be able to move fast in developing new features and products. In this talk, I will describe two recent projects on using pluggable type systems to reduce the tension between these seemingly-conflicting needs. First, I will present NullAway, a novel nullability type system for Java. NullAway improves on previous work by reducing build-time overhead and requiring fewer annotations through carefully-targeted unsoundness. Then, I will describe more recent work on the Object Construction Checker, a novel type system to ensure the safe usage of builders and other complex schemes for flexible object construction.

Manu Sridharan

University of California Riverside

United States