Genetic Improvement @ ICSE 2021

Following Dr. Stephanie Forrest of Arizona State University's keynote presentation there was a wide ranging discussion at the tenth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2021 @ ICSE (held as part of the International Conference on Software Engineering on Sunday 30th May 2021). Topics included a growing range of target systems and appli- cations, algorithmic improvements, wide-ranging questions about how other elds (especially evolutionary computation) can inform advances in GI, and about how GI is 'branded' to other disciplines. We give a personal perspective on the workshop's proceedings, the discussions that took place, and resulting prospective directions for future research.

Shadow Program Committee Initiative

The Shadow Program Committee (PC) is an initiative/program that provides an opportunity to Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), i.e., PhD students, postdocs, new faculty members, and industry practitioners, who have not been in a PC, to learn rst-hand about the peer-review process of the technical track at Software Engi- neering (SE) conferences. This program aims to train the next generation of PC members as well as to allow ECRs to be recog- nized and embedded in the research community. By participating in this program, ECRs will have a great chance i) to gain expe- rience about the reviewing process including the restrictions and ethical standards of the academic peer-review process; ii) to be mentored by senior researchers on how to write a good review; and iii) to create a network with other ECRs and senior researchers (i.e., Shadow PC advisors). The Shadow PC program was rst introduced to the SE research community at the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) confer- ence in 2021. The program was led by Patanamon Thongta- nunam and Ayushi Rastogi (Shadow PC Co-chairs) with support from Shadow PC Advisor Co-Chairs (Foutse Khomh and Serge Demeyer), PC Co-Chairs of the technical track (Meiyappan Na- gappan and Kelly Blincoe), and the General Chair of the con- ference, Gregorio Robles. To promote and facilitate the Shadow PC program at SE conferences in the future, this report provides details about the process and a re ection on the Shadow PC pro- gram during MSR2021. The presentation slides and video are also available online at https://youtu.be/ReUXwmtIEk8.

SERP4IoT'21 Workshop Report

We face a new software crisis. In 1968, computer scientists learned that developing robust software requires skills, methods, and tools. Today, software and hardware engineers realize that developing a robust Internet of Things (IoT) also pushes the states of their art and practice. Recent news illustrate the many problems faced by IoT: from lack of interoperability to broken updates to massive security attacks. In this context, the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Practices for the Internet of Things (SERP4IoT) aims to provide a highly interactive forum for researchers and practitioners to address the challenges of, nd solutions for, and share experiences with the development, release, and testing of robust software for IoT systems.

Pains and Gains of Peer-Reviewing in Software Engineering (5)

ACM SIGSOFT SEN's column on "Pains and Gains of Peer-Reviewing in Software Engineering" aims at fostering an open, constructive, and lively discussion on the peer-reviewing currently adopted by SE venues, e.g., how to further enhance them and make them sustainable on the long run. This fifth editorial introduces a new contribution to the column, which provides a journal-centric perspective on the topic.

An Interview with Laurie Williams - ACM Fellow 2020

Laurie Williams is one of the five ACM Fellows of the 2020 cohort who are also active SIGSOFT members. To celebrate her award, we invited her to a question/answer session.

Passages

Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern" is not the Hofstadter book people probably expected to eventually turn up in a Passages column, to be honest. And I do not want to disparage his most famous work; I read Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) one Christmas vacation, I believe when I was in the eighth grade, and it was a revelatory and enchanting experience, with a profound impact on the course of my future life. But everyone knows about that book, and has an opinion on it; I think it's a literary masterpiece and even when it gets something wrong, it does so in an interesting way.

How Do Developers Blog?

A decade ago, the rise of GitHub and StackOverflow as social version control and knowledge sharing environments was about to start. Social media like Twitter were mocked by some software engineering researchers and practitioners as "tools for kids not professionals". At that time, we published one of the first papers [12] on social media in software engineering at MSR 2011, the Mining Software Repositories Conference.

TC4JPF

Java Path nder (JPF) is a very versatile program analysis tool, but understanding the error traces it generates is challenging. Visualizing traces can facilitate their understanding. Earlier attempts to visualize traces have resulted in specialized tools that do not interoperate with other frameworks. We present TC4JPF, which builds on Eclipse Trace Compass and enables Trace Compass to visualize JPF traces. With TC4JPF, we leverage the scalability and capabilities of Trace Compass and provide the rst solution that visualizes JPF traces in a general-purpose trace visualization tool.

Finding Software License Violations Through Binary Code Clone Detection - A Retrospective

Ten years ago, we published the article Finding software license violations through binary code clone detection at the MSR 2011 conference. Our paper was motivated by the tendency of em- bedded hardware vendors to only release binary blobs of their rmware, often violating the licensing terms of open-source soft- ware present inside those blobs. The techniques presented in our paper were designed to accurately identify open-source code hid- den inside binary blobs. Here, we give our perspectives on the impact of our work, both industrially and academically, and re- visit the original problem statement to see what has happened in the eld of open-source compliance in the intervening decade.

SIGSOFT Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

As software becomes more important and ubiquitous, high quality software also becomes crucial. We depend on software developers who write the software to also maintain and improve its quality. When developers make changes to software, they rely on continuous integration [6] and regression testing [15] to check that changes do not break existing functionality. Continuous integration (CI) automates the process of building and testing software after every change. The process of running tests on the code after every change is known as regression testing. The goal of regression testing is to allow developers to detect and fix faults early on, ideally the moment the faults are introduced. Regression testing is widely used in both industry and open source, but regression testing suffers from two main challenges: (1) regression testing is costly, and (2) regression test suites often contain flaky tests.