Enhancing example-based code search with functional semantics

Chen, Zhengzhao; Jiang, Renhe; Zhang, Zejun; Pei, Yu; Pan, Minxue; Zhang, Tian; Li, Xuandong

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2020.110568

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…To answer RQ4, we employ two symbolic‐execution‐based test case generation tools, namely, Symbolic Pathfinder (SPF) and enhanced SPF (ESPF), to generate test cases for the 24 utility methods. SPF[22] is built on the top of the JPF model checker, while ESPF [23] extends SPF and is able to make use of available method specifications in SMT during its analysis. In particular, ESPF modified the interpretation of invoke instructions in SPF in such a way that, when an invocation to a method with specification in SMT is encountered, the specification is incorporated directly in the same way as is done during the translation from OCL to SMT (Section 3.4).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documentation‐based functional constraint generation for library methods

Jiang

Chen

Pei

et al. 2021

Software Testing Verif & Rel

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Summary Although software libraries promote code reuse and facilitate software development, they increase the complexity of programme analysis tasks. To effectively analyse programmes built on top of software libraries, it is essential to have specifications for the library methods that can be easily processed by analysis tools. However, the availability of such specifications is seriously limited at the moment. Manually writing the specifications can be prohibitively expensive and error‐prone, while existing automated approaches to inferring the specifications seldom produce results that are strong enough to be used in programme analysis. In this work, we propose the Doc2smt approach to generating strong functional constraints in SMT for library methods based on their documentations. Doc2smt first applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a set of rules to translate a method's natural language documentation into a large number of candidate constraint clauses in OCL. Then, it utilizes a manually enhanced domain model to identify OCL candidate constraint clauses that comply with the problem domain in static validation, translates well‐formed OCL constraints into the SMT‐LIB format, and checks whether each SMB‐LIB constraint rightly abstracts the functionalities of the method under consideration via testing in dynamic validation. In the end, it reports the first functional constraint that survives both validations to the user as the result. We have implemented the approach into a supporting tool with the same name. In experiments conducted on 451 methods from the Java Collections Framework and the Java IO library, Doc2smt generated correct constraints for 309 methods, with the average generation time for each correct constraint being merely 2.7 min. We have also applied the generated constraints to facilitate symbolic‐execution‐based test generation with the Symbolic Java PathFinder (SPF) tool. For 24 utility methods manipulating Java container and IO objects, SPF with access to the generated constraints produced 51.2 times more test cases than SPF without the access.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documentation‐based functional constraint generation for library methods

Jiang

Chen

Pei

et al. 2021

Software Testing Verif & Rel

Self Cite

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“…The code search is then transformed into a sub-graph matching issue between query and code. However, most heuristic models search code by designing a customized Matching between query and code [9,137,138], such as designed similarity score [13,137], static analysis [103,124], and dynamic analysis [21,122].…”

Section: Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The set of intersected code snippets are then returned as recommended code snippets. [21] or test cases [66]. An I/O example code search tool aims to find the code methods that match a specified I/O example.…”

Section: Code Clone Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An I/O example code search tool aims to find the code methods that match a specified I/O example. How the code behaves is unimportant [21]. Table 11 shows I/O example code search tools included in this systematic review.…”

Section: Code Clone Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although Satsy has been applied to search for Java code in previous studies [122], its usefulness in daily code search activities is limited, as it handles only loop-free code snippets manipulating data of char, int, boolean, and String types. To extend the usefulness of Satsy, Chen et al [21] proposed a tool Quebio. Different from Satsy, its symbolic encoding phase supports more language features like the invocation to library APIs, which enables Quebio to handle more data types (e.g., array, List, Set, and Map) during the search.…”

Section: Code Clone Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Opportunities and Challenges in Code Search Tools

Liu,

Xia,

et al. 2020

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Code search is a core software engineering task. Effective code search tools can help developers substantially improve their software development efficiency and effectiveness. In recent years, many code search studies have leveraged different techniques, such as deep learning and information retrieval approaches, to retrieve expected code from a large-scale codebase. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive comparative summary of existing code search approaches. To understand the research trends in existing code search studies, we systematically reviewed 81 relevant studies. We investigated the publication trends of code search studies, analyzed key components, such as codebase, query, and modeling technique used to build code search tools, and classified existing tools into focusing on supporting seven different search tasks. Based on our findings, we identified a set of outstanding challenges in existing studies and a research roadmap for future code search research.CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Search-based software engineering.

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A new way of search query like knowledge graph and its interpretability

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2024

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Enhancing example-based code search with functional semantics

Cited by 12 publications

References 25 publications

Documentation‐based functional constraint generation for library methods

Documentation‐based functional constraint generation for library methods

Opportunities and Challenges in Code Search Tools

A new way of search query like knowledge graph and its interpretability

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