Science of Computer Programming

Circular references keep objects in loops from being released even if they are no longer reachable. Programming languages provide various garbage collection strategies for reclaiming unused objects at runtime. For example, CPython is ...

• We conducted an empirical study on circular references in Python using real-world data collected from 671 open-source projects.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in cryptography typically impose concealed usage constraints. The violations of these usage constraints can lead to software crashes or security vulnerabilities. Several professional tools can ...

• An intelligent tutoring approach for educating secure software development.
• An ...

LabVIEW is a popular commercial modeling tool that is often used in systems engineering. LabVIEW also includes a special programming language developed for engineers to help them support the automation of computer-aided systems. ...

The Stack Overflow Q&A platform boasts an active community of users who often include code snippets in their questions and answers. Several development tools rely on these code snippets as a source of information. Although code ...

• Stack Overflow code snippets might lack information about referenced API types.

User stories are the main approach to specifying requirements in agile development. Nowadays, a software project normally involves a huge amount of user stories, which makes it a challenging job to efficiently manage these stories. One ...

• We propose a framework for grouping user stories.
• The framework applies ...

High-quality labeled textual data are reported as an important type of research data in data-driven requirements engineering (RE), especially in automatic mining and analysis of massive textual data produced by software systems. ...

• CoolTeD supports the full spectrum of manual labeling of textual datasets for the RE purpose.

Writing tests for software systems is an important but expensive activity that plays a critical role in the success of the software. This is particularly true in systems where the interaction space is fine grained and in continuous ...

• Model-based testing (MBT) has been proven effective for testing complex systems.