11:00 - 11:20

• A Unified Framework for the Comprehension of Software's Time Dimension

  The dimension of time in software appears in both program execution and software evolution. Much research has been devoted to the understanding of either program execution or software evolution, but these two research communities have developed tools and solutions exclusively in their respective context. In this paper, we claim that a common comprehension framework should apply to the time dimension of software. We formalize this as a meta-model that we instantiate and apply to the two different comprehension problems.

   

  Preprint available:

Omar Benomar; Houari Sahraoui; Pierre Poulin

Université de Montréal, Canada

11:20 - 11:40

• Smart Programming Playgrounds

  Modern IDEs contain sophisticated components for inferring missing types, correcting bad syntax and completing partial expressions in code, but they are limited to the context that is explicitly defined in a project's configuration. These tools are ill-suited for quick prototyping of incomplete code snippets, such as those found on the Web in Q&A forums or walk-through tutorials, since such code snippets often assume the availability of external dependencies and may even contain implicit references to an execution environment that provides data or compute services. We propose an architecture for smart programming playgrounds that can facilitate rapid prototyping of incomplete code snippets through a semi-automatic context resolution that involves identifying static dependencies, provisioning external resources on the cloud and injecting resource bindings to handles in the original code fragment. Such a system could be potentially useful in a range of different scenarios, from sharing code snippets on the Web to experimenting with new ideas during traditional software development.

   

  Preprint available:

Rohan Padhye; Pankaj Dhoolia; Senthil Mani; Vibha Singhal Sinha

IBM Research, India

11:40 - 11:50

• Capsule-Oriented Programming

  Explicit concurrency should be abolished from all higher-level programming languages (i.e. Everything except-perhaps-plain machine code. Dijkstra 68 (paraphrased). A promising class of concurrency abstractions replaces explicit concurrency mechanisms with a single linguistic mechanism that combines state and control and uses asynchronous messages for communications, e.g. Active objects or actors, but that doesn't remove the hurdle of understanding non-local control transfer. What if the programming model enabled programmers to simply do what they do best, that is, to describe a system in terms of its modular structure and write sequential code to implement the operations of those modules and handles details of concurrency? In a recently sponsored NSF project we are developing such a model that we call capsule-oriented programming and its realization in the Panini project. This model favors modularity over explicit concurrency, encourages concurrency correctness by construction, and exploits modular structure of programs to expose implicit concurrency.

   

  Preprint available:

Hridesh Rajan

Iowa State University, USA

11:50 - 12:00

• Evolution-Aware Monitoring-Oriented Programming

  Monitoring-Oriented Programming (MOP) helps develop more reliable software by means of monitoring against formal specifications. While MOP showed promising results, all prior research has focused on checking a single version of software. We propose to extend MOP to support multiple software versions and thus be more relevant in the context of rapid software evolution. Our approach, called eMOP, is inspired by regression test selection—a well studied, evolution-centered technique. The key idea in eMOP is to monitor only the parts of code that changed between versions. We illustrate eMOP by means of a running example, and show the results of preliminary experiments. eMOP opens up a new line of research on MOP—it can significantly improve usability and performance when applied across multiple versions of software and is complementary to algorithmic MOP advances on a single version.

   

  Preprint available:

Owolabi Legunsen; Darko Marinov; Grigore Rosu

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

12:00 - 12:10

• Towards Explicitly Elastic Programming Frameworks

  It is a widely held view that software engineers should not be "burdened" with the responsibility of making their application components elastic, and that elasticity should be either be implicit and automatic in the programming framework, or that it is the responsibility of the cloud provider's operational staff (DevOps) to make distributed applications written for dedicated clusters elastic and execute them on cloud environments. In this paper, we argue the opposite – we present a case for explicit elasticity, where software engineers are given the flexibility to explicitly engineer elasticity into their distributed applications. We present several scenarios where elasticity retrofitted to applications by DevOps is ineffective, present preliminary empirical evidence that explicit elasticity improves efficiency, and argue for elastic programming languages and frameworks to reduce programmer effort in engineering elastic distributed applications. We also present a bird's eye view of ongoing work on two explicitly elastic programming frameworks – Elastic Thrift (based on Apache Thrift) and Elastic Java, an extension of Java with support for explicit elasticity.

   

  Preprint available:

K.R. Jayaram

IBM Research TJ Watson, USA

12:10 - 12:20

• Optimising Energy Consumption of Design Patterns

  Software design patterns are widely used in software engineering to enhance productivity and maintainability. However, recent empirical studies revealed the high energy overhead in these patterns. Our vision is to automatically detect and transform design patterns during compilation for better energy efficiency without impacting existing coding practices. In this paper, we propose compiler transformations for two design patterns, Observer and Decorator, and perform an initial evaluation of their energy efficiency.

   

  Preprint available:

Adel Noureddine; Ajitha Rajan

University of Edinburgh, UK