Over the past four decades, software engineering has emerged as a discipline in its own right, though it has roots both in computer science and in classical engineering. Its philosophical foundations and premises are not yet well understood. In recent times, members of the software engineering community have started to search for such foundations. In particular, the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper have been used by philosophically-minded software engineers in search of a deeper understanding of their discipline. It seems, however, that professional philosophers of science are not yet aware of this new discourse within the field of software engineering. Therefore, this article aims to reflect critically upon recent software engineers' attempts towards a philosophy of software engineering and to introduce our own philosophical thoughts in this context. Finally, we invite the professional philosophers of science to participate in this interesting new discourse.
Data races in multi-threaded programs are a common source of serious software failures. Their undefined behavior may lead to intermittent failures with unforeseeable, and in embedded systems, even life-threatening consequences. To mitigate these risks, various detection tools have been created to help identify potential data races. However, these tools produce thousands of data race warnings, often in text-based format, which makes the manual assessment process slow and errorprone.Through visualization, we aim to speed up the data race assessment process by reducing the amount of information to be investigated, and to provide a versatile interface that quality assurance engineers can use to investigate data race warnings. The ultimate goal of our integrated software suite, called RaceView, is to improve the usability of the data race information to such an extent that the elimination of data races can be incorporated into the regular software development process.
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