Derivative software development complicates the base software over the years of enhancement and maintenance. It reduces the source code readability, taking developers a long time to understand the software structure and its various parts. In software engineering, software is often compared to buildings. We propose to use this metaphor from a new prospective to help developers understand the existing software efficiently. In this paper, we present a tool called "CodeHouse" that visualizes the source code of the software in a VR space as if it were a house. By placing rooms, which represent modules of the software, on the inside of a virtual cylinder, the CodeHouse makes it possible for the developers to understand both the whole structure of the software and the details of individual program parts before they begin derivative development. The CodeHouse also links with a debugger and helps developers to understand the dynamic behaviors of the program.

Much work has been done on automating regression testing for applications. But most of them focus on test execution. Little work has been done on automatically determining if a test case passes or fails. This decision is often made by comparing the results of executing test cases on a base version of the application and post-modification version of the application. If the two results match, the test case passes, otherwise fails. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no regression testing method for automatically deciding pass/fail of dynamic Web applications which use JavaScript or CSS. We propose a method that automatically decides if a dynamic Web application passes a regression test case. The basic idea is to obtain a screenshot each time the GUI of the Web application (i.e. Web page) changes its state, and then compare each corresponding screenshot to see if they match. The evaluation results showed that the accuracy rate of our approach is high and our approach can be considered as fast enough for practical use.

Much work has been done on automating regression testing for Web applications, but most of them focus on test data generation or test execution.Little work has been done on automatically determining if a test passed or failed; testers would need to visually confirm the result which can be a tedious task.The difficulty is compounded by the fact that parts of a Web page (such as advertisements) may change each time the Web application is executed even though it has no bearing on the Web application function itself.We thus propose a test oracle for automatically determining the result of regression testing a Web application.The key point of our approach is the identification of parts that may change, which we call variable region.We first generate the expected result, by executing the original (premodification) Web application multiple times so that variable regions can be identified.Then, after the Web application is modified, regression testing is conducted by comparing the output of the modified Web application against the expected output.An evaluation confirmed the usefulness of our approach.

This paper introduces the datacasting coding scheme named Broadcast Markup Language (BML). BML is used for all the digital broadcast such as satellite and terrestrial digital broadcasting in Japan. BML is based on web technology standard; however, some extensions and restrictions are applied for broadcast purposes. These extensions and restrictions are introduced in this paper.