A large-scale study on the usage of Java’s concurrent programming constructs

Pinto, Gustavo; Torres, Weslley; Fernandes, Benito; Castor, Fernando; Barros, Roberto Souto Maior de

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2015.04.064

Cited by 44 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Parnin et al have studied adoption of Java generics [70], Pinto et al studied concurrent programming constructs [71], and Dyer et al studied features prior to their official release [72]. Similar studies have also been conducted, e.g., for C# [73] and PHP [60].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Landman

Serebrenik

Vinju

2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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Abstract-The behavior of software that uses the Java Reflection API is fundamentally hard to predict by analyzing code. Only recent static analysis approaches can resolve reflection under unsound yet pragmatic assumptions. We survey what approaches exist and what their limitations are. We then analyze how realworld Java code uses the Reflection API, and how many Java projects contain code challenging state-of-the-art static analysis.Using a systematic literature review we collected and categorized all known methods of statically approximating reflective Java code. Next to this we constructed a representative corpus of Java systems and collected descriptive statistics of the usage of the Reflection API. We then applied an analysis on the abstract syntax trees of all source code to count code idioms which go beyond the limitation boundaries of static analysis approaches. The resulting data answers the research questions. The corpus, the tool and the results are openly available.We conclude that the need for unsound assumptions to resolve reflection is widely supported. In our corpus, reflection can not be ignored for 78 % of the projects. Common challenges for analysis tools such as non-exceptional exceptions, programmatic filtering meta objects, semantics of collections, and dynamic proxies, widely occur in the corpus. For Java software engineers prioritizing on robustness, we list tactics to obtain more easy to analyze reflection code, and for static analysis tool builders we provide a list of opportunities to have significant impact on real Java code.Keywords-Java; Reflection; Static Analysis; Systematic Literature Review; Empirical Study I. I Static analysis techniques are applied to support the efficiency and quality of software engineering tasks. Be it for understanding, validating, or refactoring source code, pragmatic static analysis tools exist to reduce error-prone manual labor and to increase the comprehension of complex software artefacts.Static analysis of object-oriented code is an exciting, ongoing and challenging research area, made especially challenging by dynamic language features (a.k.a. reflection). The Java Reflection API allows programmers to dynamically inspect and interact with otherwise static language concepts such as classes, fields and methods, e.g., to dynamically instantiate objects, set fields and invoke methods. These dynamic language features are useful, but their usage also wreaks havoc on the accuracy of static analysis results. This is due to the undecidability of resolving dynamic names and dynamic types.Until 2005, the analysis of code which uses the Reflection API was considered to be out of bounds for static analysis, and handled via user annotations or dynamic analysis; handling reflection would inherently be either unsound (due to unverified assumptions) or highly inaccurate (due to over-approximation) and render the contemporary static analysis tools impractical. Then, in 2005 Livshits et al. [1] published an analysis of how reflection was used in six large Java projects...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Landman

Serebrenik

Vinju

2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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“…Prior research has been focusing on the analysis of official releases of software to understand how its code quality evolves . This approach gives an insight on change in code quality over the major milestones of software development, rather than how code quality evolves during software development process.…”

Section: Squaad Toolsetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipatory development processes for reducing total ownership costs and schedules

Boehm

Behnamghader

2019

Systems Engineering

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Many systems and software processes overfocus on getting a project and product from an initial set of requirements to an Initial Operational Capability (IOC). Examples are most waterfall and V models. Projects following such processes may pass acceptance tests for functionality and performance, but may leave the product with serious maintainability shortfalls. Many agile processes focus on users' initial usage priorities, but often make development commitments for earlier needs that are incompatible with achieving later critical needs (eg, security, safety). Incremental development process models can do better, but often later increments may find that the earlier increments have not prepared them for ease of modification and repair. Besides increasing Total Ownership Costs (TOCs), long mean times to repair result in long downtimes, which can be critical to an organization's income and reputation. Furthermore, many of these shortfalls take the form of Technical Debt (TD), in that the later they are fixed, the more slow and expensive will be the fixes. This paper summarizes three process frameworks and tools providing more anticipatory ways to improve systems and software maintainability and life‐cycle cost‐effectiveness. The first framework is an Opportunity Tree for identifying and anticipating such ways. The second framework, Software Quality Understanding by Analysis of Abundant Data (SQUAAD), is a toolset for tracking a software project's incremental code commits, and analyzing and visualizing each commit's incremental and cumulative TD. The third framework is a Software/Systems Maintenance Readiness Framework (SMRF), that identifies needed maintenance readiness levels at development decision reviews, similar to the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) framework.

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“…For example, Fraser and Arcuri measured that in 110 randomly chosen open source projects, 42% of the classes manipulate the file system, and 30% try to open a socket. Pinto et al report that in 2227 analyzed Java projects, 77.5% contained at least 1 occurrence of a concurrent programming construct.…”

Section: Features To Comparementioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating code‐based test input generator tools

Cseppento

Micskei

2017

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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Summary In recent years, several tools have been developed to automatically select test inputs from the code of the system under test. However, each of these tools has different advantages, and there is a little detailed feedback available on the actual capabilities of the various tools. To evaluate test input generators, this paper collects a set of programming language concepts that should be handled by the tools and maps these core concepts and challenging features like handling the environment or multi‐threading to 363 code snippets, respectively. These snippets would serve as inputs for the tools. Next, the paper presents SETTE, an automated framework to execute and evaluate these snippets. Using SETTE, multiple experiments were performed on five Java and one .NET‐based tools using symbolic execution, search‐based, and random techniques. The test suites' coverage, size, generation time, and mutation score were compared. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each tool and approach and identify hard code parts that are difficult to tackle for most of the tools. We hope that this research could serve as actionable feedback to tool developers and help practitioners assess the readiness of test input generation.

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A large-scale study on the usage of Java’s concurrent programming constructs

Cited by 44 publications

References 34 publications

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Anticipatory development processes for reducing total ownership costs and schedules

Evaluating code‐based test input generator tools

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