In today's modern world, bugs in software systems incur significant costs. One promising approach to improve software quality is automated software verification. In this approach, an automated tool tries to prove the software correct once and for all. Although significant progress has been made in this direction, there are still many cases where automated tools fail. We focus specifically on one aspect of software verification that has been notoriously hard to automate: inferring loop invariants that are strong enough to enable verification. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem through gamification and crowdsourcing. In particular, we present a puzzle game where players find loop invariants without being aware of it, and without requiring any expertise on software verification. We show through an experiment with Mechanical Turk users that players enjoy the game, and are able to solve verification tasks that automated state-of-the-art tools cannot.

Code changes are often reviewed before they are deployed. Popular source control systems aid code review by presenting textual differences between old and new versions of the code, leaving developers with the difficult task of determining whether the differences actually produced the desired behavior. Fortunately, we can mine such information from code repositories. We propose aiding code review with inter-version semantic differential analysis. During review of a new commit, a developer is presented with summaries of both code differences and behavioral differences, which are expressed as diffs of likely invariants extracted by running the system's test cases. As a result, developers can more easily determine that the code changes produced the desired effect. We created an invariant-mining tool chain, Getty, to support our concept of semantically-assisted code review. To validate our approach, 1) we applied Getty to the commits of 6 popular open source projects, 2) we assessed the performance and cost of running Getty in different configurations, and 3) we performed a comparative user study with 18 developers. Our results demonstrate that semantically-assisted code review is feasible, effective, and that real programmers can leverage it to improve the quality of their reviews.

Maintenance and evolution are important parts for all successful software projects. In recent years, version control systems have played a key role in software development process. Not only do they provide a means to coordinate programmers, organize and manage source code, but they also persist the evolution history of the source code into their software repositories. Mining software repositories has provided many insights on the evolution of software, both for researchers and practitioners. In this paper we propose that versioned software contracts -- mined from software repositories -- can be a powerful tool for better understanding and supporting software evolution. Tooling support is critical, due to the complexities of configuring, compiling, and running the software to produce meaningful inferred contracts. This paper contributes both techniques and tool support for downloading, building, and analyzing open source software from social coding sites like GitHub. The tool automatically produces a description of software evolution represented by versions of program invariants.

We present a vision for the evolution of automotive diagnostics as car electronics are increasingly implemented as distributed systems. We first analyze the state of the art in the automotive development process, and we identify how distributed functionality challenges this process and leads to higher development and field maintenance costs. To address these challenges, we propose a modified development process that leverages a model-based approach. Finally, we outline future research directions for car diagnostics.

Journal Article Interaction-based Runtime Verification for Systems of Systems Integration Get access Ingolf H. Krüger, Ingolf H. Krüger Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0404, USA. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Michael Meisinger, Michael Meisinger Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0404, USA. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Massimiliano Menarini Massimiliano Menarini Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0404, USA. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume 20, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 725–742, https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exn079 Published: 15 November 2008 Article history Received: 04 July 2008 Published: 15 November 2008

Automotive and avionics systems are complex, distributed, software-intensive systems-of-systems (SoS). Consequently, system integration is a central challenge in both domains. Important cross-cutting requirements aspects, such as security, authorization, and failure management, are best understood as properties of the interplay among sub-systems. Yet, traditional development processes address the integration challenge only late, at the level of implementation and deployment. Consequently, potentials for reuse within and across product lines are left unrealized. Furthermore, late integration leads to high calibration, configuration and redesign costs. Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have emerged as a solution to the integration challenge. However, inappropriate application of SOA-principles results in a high degree of fragmentation and scattering of functionality-this leads to additional difficulties in requirements traceability and quality assurance. In this article, we give a comprehensive overview of these SOA-challenges, and present Rich Services as a hierarchical SOA blueprint and development process enabling SoS integration in a dependable way. Rich Services introduce services as hierarchical, partial interaction patterns; these interactions are then augmented with infrastructure elements to inject behaviors that address cross-cutting requirements aspects. Rich Services also seamlessly address the mapping from logical to deployment architectures. Using end-to-end failure management as an example, we illustrate the utility of Rich Services.

System-of-systems integration is a fundamental challenge to Software Engineering. Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies help overcoming this challenge by addressing loose coupling of services while provisioning for crosscutting concerns. ESBs use aspect-oriented techniques and flexible message routing and filtering to support decoupling of the business logic from crosscutting concerns such as encryption and failure management. These characteristics have led to an increasing adoption of ESBs in the enterprise business domain. However, currently there is no systematic development approach for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) ranging from requirements analysis to architecture design to ESB deployment. A core challenge is the precise specification of the routing capabilities of the ESB. A viable solution should maintain the decoupling of crosscutting concerns from the business logic while being able to reason about the integrated interaction pattern. In this paper we leverage the Rich Service architectural blueprint in combination with Aspect-Oriented Modeling techniques to address this problem.

One of the key challenges to successful systems-of-systems integration using Web services technologies is how to address crosscutting architectural concerns such as policy management, governance, and authentication, while still maintaining the lightweight implementation and deployment Jlavor that distinguishes Web services fiom earlier attempts at providing interoperable enterprise systems. To address this challenge, this article introduces the notion of a Rich Service, an extension of the standard service notion, based on an architectural pattern that allows hierarchical decomposition of system architecture according to separate concerns. Rich Services enable the capture of dzfferent system aspects and their interactions. By leveraging emerging Enterprise Service Bus technologies, Rich Services also enable a direct transition from a logical to a deployed service-oriented architecture (SOA). This results in immediate beneJits not only in SOA design, implementation, deployment, and quality assurance, but also in the traceability of architectural requirements to an SOA implementation.