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Software & Research Data          

Please visit my group's GitHub page to see a up-to-date list of software tools and research data. GitHub

BigDebug

bigdebug
Apache Spark has become a key platform for Big Data Analytics, yet it lacks support for interactive debugging. As a result, debugging Spark programs can be a painstakingly long process. To address this challenge, we designed BigDebug with a set of interactive, real-time debugging primitives for Apache Spark. This requires rethinking the notion of step-through debugging in a traditional debugger such as gdb, because pausing the entire computation across distributed worker nodes causes significant delay and naively inspecting millions of records using a watchpoint is too time consuming for an end user.

BIGDEBUG provides simulated breakpoints and on-demand watchpoints to allow users to selectively examine distributed, intermediate data on the cloud. A user can also pinpoint a crash-inducing record and selectively resume relevant sub-computations after a quick fix. A user can determine the root causes of errors (or delays) at the level of individual records through fine-grained data provenance. BIGDEBUG scales to terabytes. Its record-level tracing inurs less than 25% overhead on average. It determines crash culprits orders of magnitude more accurately and provides up to 100% time saving compared to the baseline replay debugger.

BigDebug's project website is available at here

Critics

critics
During peer code reviews, developers often examine program differences. When using existing program differencing tools, it is difficult for developers to inspect systematic changes?similar, related changes that are scattered across multiple files. Developers cannot easily answer questions such as "what other code locations changed similar to this change?" and "are there any other locations that are similar to this code but are not updated?" Critics assists developers in inspecting systematic changes. It (1) allows developers to customize a context-aware change template, (2) searches for systematic changes using the template, and (3) detects missing or inconsistent edits. Developers can interactively refine the customized change template to see corresponding search results.

Critics Eclipse plug-in is developed by Tianyi Zhang and Myoungkyu Song. Please check out the demonstration video of Critics here.

RefDistiller

refdistiller

Manual refactoring edits are error prone, as refactoring requires developers to coordinate related transformations and understand the complex inter-relationship between affected files, variables, and methods. We propose RefDistiller, an approach for improving detection of manual refactoring anomalies by two combined strategies. First, it uses a predefined template to identify potential missed refactoring edits---omission anomalies. Second, it leverages an automated refactoring engine to separate behavior-preserving edits from behavior-modifying edits---commission anomalies. We evaluate its effectiveness on a data set with one hundred manual refactoring bugs. These bugs are hard to detect because they do not produce any compilation errors nor are caught by the pre- and post-condition checking of many existing refactoring engines. RefDistiller is able to identify 97% of the erroneous edits, of which 24% are not detected by the given test suites.

RefDistiller Eclipse plug-in
is developed and maintained by Everton Leandro. Its evaluation data set is available and tool is available here. Please check out the demonstration video of RefDistiller here.

Lase

LASE
Adding features and fixing bugs in software often require systematic edits which are similar, but not identical, changes to many code locations. Finding all relevant locations and making the correct edits is a tedious and error-prone process. We demonstrate an Eclipse plug-in called LASE that (1) creates context-aware  edit scripts from two or more examples, and uses these scripts to (2) automatically identify edit locations and to (3) transform the code.  In LASE, users can view individual syntactic edit operations and corresponding control and data flow context for each input example. They can also choose a different subset of the examples to adjust the abstraction level of inferred edit. When LASE locates target methods matching the inferred edit context and suggests customized edits, users can review and correct LASE's edit suggestion.  These features can reduce developers' burden in repetitively applying similar edits to different contexts.

Lase Eclipse plug-in is developed and maintained by John Jacobellis and Na Meng. Please contact myself, John, and Na for questions and comments.  You can watch a tool demonstration video of LASE at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npDqMVP2e9Q

Please also see our 10 page technical report on LASE and our 4 page tool demo paper under submission.

Cookbook


Existing code completion engines leverage only pre-defined templates or match a set of user-defined APIs to complete the rest of changes. We propose a new code completion technique, called Cookbook, where developers can define custom edit recipes?a reusable template of complex edit operations?by specifying change examples. It generates an abstract edit recipe that describes the most specific generalization of the demonstrated example program transformations. Given a library of edit recipes, it matches a developer?s edit stream to recommend a suitable recipe that is capable of filling out the rest of change customized to the target. Our demo video is available here.

Cookbook is developed by John Jacobellis.

Repertoire 

repertoire Repertoire detects repetitive and similar edits among a group of program patches and it is based on CCFinderX. Thus it can identify ported code from the program patches. Repertoire can be used to evaluate repetitive work in similar products and our research group has used Repertoire to analyze the extent and characteristic of cross-system porting in forked projects.  You can download Repertoire from here and access the analysis data that we have made available in public.

Repertoire is developed and maintained by Baishakhi Ray. Please contact myself and Baishakhi Ray for questions and comments.
Repertoire has its own tool web site and the analysis data on 18 years of the BSD product family is available as well.


Sydit 

sydit
Bug fixes and feature additions to large code bases often require systematic edits---similar, but not identical, coordinated changes to multiple places.  This process is tedious and error-prone. SYDIT supports a systematic editing approach by creating generalized edit scripts from exemplar edits and applying them to user-selected targets. A programmer provides an example edit to SYDIT that consists of an old and new version of a changed method. Based on this one example, SYDIT generates a context-aware, abstract edit script. To make transformations applicable to similar but not identical methods, SYDIT  encodes control, data, and containment dependences and abstracts position, type, method, and variable names. Then the programmer selects target methods and SYDIT customizes the edit script to each target and displays the results for the programmer to review and approve.

SYDIT is available as an Eclipse plug-in and this tool is developed and maintained by Na Meng. Please contact myself and Na Meng for accessing the plug-in and for questions and comments.  Please read our SYDIT research paper (PLDI 2011) and a tool demo paper (FSE 2011). 

Supplementary Patch Data 

supplementary patch
A recent study finds that errors of omission are harder for programmers to detect than errors of commission. While several change recommendation systems already exist to prevent or reduce omission errors during software development, there have been very few studies on why errors of omission occur in practice and how such errors could be prevented. In order to understand the characteristics of omission errors, we investigate a group of bugs that were fixed more than once in open source projects?those bugs whose initial patches were later considered incomplete and to which programmers applied supplementary patches. Please read our supplementary bug fix study paper (MSR 2012).  Our data on Eclipse JDT core, Eclipse SWT, and Mozilla are available to public and are maintained by Jihun Park. This data has been used by researchers at UIUC and Waterloo on a study of performance bug fixes.

RefFinder 

REFFINDER RefFinder  identifies complex refactorings between two program versions using a template-based refactoring reconstruction approach---RefFinder expresses each refactoring type in terms of template logic rules and uses a logic programming engine to infer concrete refactoring instances. It currently supports sixty three refactoring types from Fowler's catalog, showing the most comprehensive coverage among existing techniques. The evaluation using code examples from Fowler's catalog and open source project histories (jEdit, Columba and carol) shows that RefFinder identifies refactorings with an overall precision of 0.79 and recall of 0.95.  
 RefFinder Eclipse plug-in is available for download. Please contact myself and Napol Rachatasumrit for questions and comments.  Please read our RefFinder research paper (ICSM 2010) and a tool demo paper (FSE 2010).  

RefFinder results are stored in an XML format and the following zip file includes our manual inspection results on three subject programs: JMeter, Ant, and XMLSecurity. These results are used to investigate the impact of Refactoring on Regression Testing. This data set is available in public:  inspected_dataset.zip 


VDiff

VDIFF During code review tasks, comparing two versions of a hardware design description using existing program differencing tools such as diff is inherently limited because existing program differencing tools implicitly assume sequential execution semantics, while hardware description languages are designed to model concurrent computation. We designed a position-independent differencing algorithm to robustly handle language constructs whose relative orderings do not matter. This paper presents Vdiff, an instantiation of this position-independent differencing algorithm for Verilog HDL. To help programmers reason about the differences at a high-level, Vdiff outputs syntactic differences in terms of Verilog-specific change types. We evaluated Vdiff on two open source hardware design projects. The evaluation result shows that Vdiff is very accurate, with overall 96.8% precision and 97.3% recall when using manually classified differences as a basis of comparison.
Data from our ASE 2010 paper. 
DRAM module: RAMP project's Verilog files used for our evaluation
UART module: UART project's Verilog files used for our evaluation
VDiff result files

VDiff Eclipse plug-in is available for download. We are not actively maintaining binary releases of this plug-in, however we have been helping and providing source accesses. Please contact myself, Adam Duley at Intel and Chris Spandikow at IBM for questions and comments. Please read our Vdiff research paper (ASE 2010). 

Logical Structural Diff

LSDIFF Software engineers often inspect program differences when reviewing others? code changes, when writing check-in comments, or when determining why a program behaves differently from expected behavior. Program differencing tools that support these tasks are limited in their ability to group related code changes or to detect potential inconsistency in program changes. To overcome these limitations and to complement existing approaches, we built Logical Structural Diff (LSDiff) that infers systematic structural differences as logic rules, noting anomalies from systematic changes as exceptions to the logic rules. We conducted a focus group study with professional software engineers in a large E-commerce company and also compared LSDiff?s results with plain structural differences without rules and textual differences. Our evaluation suggests that LSDiff complements existing differencing tools by grouping code changes that form systematic change patterns regardless of their distribution throughout the code and that its ability to discover anomalies shows promise in detecting inconsistent changes.

Sample output (LSDiff applied to carol revision 430)

This plug-in performs Eclipse JDT analysis to extract structural differences between two versions, infers systematic changes as change-rules using the rule-inference algorithm presented in ICSE 09 paper, and presents learned rules in the LSdiff view. Please read our LSdiff research paper (ICSE 2009) and tool demo paper (ICSE 2010).  We are not actively maintaining binary releases of this plug-in. However, if you would like to have a source code access, please email me.
          LSdiff Eclipse Plug-In Web Page with Screen Shot

API Matching

Mapping code elements in one version of a program to corresponding code elements in another version is a fundamental building block for many software engineering tools. Existing tools that match code elements or identify structural changes--refactorings and API changes--between two versions of a program have two limitations that we overcome. First, existing tools cannot easily disambiguate among many potential matches or refactoring candidates. Second, it is difficult to use these tools' results for various software engineering tasks due to an unstructured representation of results. To overcome these limitations, our approach represents structural changes as a set of high-level change rules, automatically infers likely change rules and determines method-level matches based on the rules. By applying our tool to several open source projects, we show that our tool identifies matches that are difficult to find using other approaches and produces more concise results than other approaches. Our representation can serve as a better basis for other software engineering tools.

Tool
Please email me to download the source code of the API change-rule inference tool. Please refer to the "README" file. 
(1) edu.washington.cs.likelychangerule
(2) edu.ucsc.originanalysis (S.Kim's origin analysis tool is used to parse Java programs.)
       
Data from our ICSE 2007 paper. 
Jfreechart : Matching results for JFreeChart release archive.
Jhotdraw : Matching results for JHotDraw release archive.
Jedit : Matching results for JEdit release archive.
          XML data fomat description

Comparison Data. 
S.Kim et al.?s function renaming analysis (WCRE 2005) and Weissgerber and Deihl?s refactoring reconstruction (ASE 2006)
Comparison on the argouml data set used by S. Kim et al.
Comparison on the jedit data set used by S.Kim et al.
Comparison on the jedit data set used by Weissgerber and Deihl

Clone Genealogy Data

It has been broadly assumed that code clones are inherently bad and that eliminating clones by refactoring would solve the problems of code clones. To investigate the validity of this assumption, we developed a formal definition of clone evolution and built a clone genealogy tool that automatically extracts the history of code clones from a source code repository. Using our tool we extracted clone genealogy information for two Java open source projects and analyzed their evolution. Our study contradicts some conventional wisdom about clones. In particular, refactoring may not always improve
software with respect to clones for two reasons. First, many code clones exist in the system for only a short time; extensive refactoring of such short-lived clones may not be worthwhile if they are likely diverge from one another very soon. Second, many clones, especially long-lived clones that have changed consistently with other elements in the same group, are not easily refactorable due to programming language limitations. These insights show that refactoring will not help in dealing with some types of clones and open up opportunities for complementary clone maintenance tools that target these other classes of clones. Please read our FSE 2005 paper.

Alloy Clone Genealogy Model

Data
Dnsjava
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.1
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.3
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.5
Versions used in Dnsjava (Either its release version number or its check-in date and time)
Version names in chronological order
Clone text found by CCFinder per each version 

Carol
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.1
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.3
Clone genealogies with a similarity threshold 0.5
Versions used in Carol (Either its release version number or its check-in date and time)
Version names in chronological order
Clone text found by CCFinder per each version