No abstract

Several approaches have been proposed to reduce debugging costs through automated software fault diagnosis. Dynamic Slicing (DS) and Spectrum-based Fault Localization (SFL) are popular fault diagnosis techniques and normally seen as complementary. This paper reports on a comprehensive study to reassess the effects of combining DS with SFL. With this combination, components that are often involved in failing but seldom in passing test runs could be located and their suspiciousness reduced. Results show that the DS-SFL combination, coined as Tandem-FL, improves the diagnostic accuracy up to 73.7% (13.4% on average). Furthermore, results indicate that the risk of missing faulty statements, which is a DS?s key limitation, is not high ? DS misses faulty statements in 9% of the 260 cases. To sum up, we found that the DS-SFL combination was practical and effective and encourage new SFL techniques to be evaluated against that optimization.

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there is still a considerable amount of vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability of their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates the impact of patches to improve security on the maintainability of open-source software. Maintainability is measured based on the Better Code Hub's model of 10 guidelines on a dataset, including 1300 security-related commits. Results show evidence of a trade-off between security and maintainability for 41.90% of the cases, i.e., developers may hinder software maintainability. Our analysis shows that 38.29% of patches increased software complexity and 37.87% of patches increased the percentage of LOCs per unit. The implications of our study are that changes to codebases while patching vulnerabilities need to be performed with extra care; tools for patch risk assessment should be integrate into the CI/CD pipeline; computer science curricula needs to be updated; and, more secure programming languages are necessary.Keywords Software security • Software maintenance • Open-source software IntroductionSoftware quality is important because it is ultimately related to the overall cost of developing and maintaining software applications, security and safety (Slaughter et al. 1998).