CSC News

Assunção Wins Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE SANER Conference

Congratulations to Dr. Wesley K. G. Assunção, associate professor in the NC State Computer Science Department, and his co-authors, Luciano Marchezan, Edvin Herac and Alexander Egyed of Johannes Kepler Universitat Linz, and Saad Shafiq of University of Southern California, for winning the IEEE Computer Society TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at the 31^st IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2024) held this month in Rovaniemi, Finland.

The winning paper is “Exploring Dependencies Among Inconsistencies to Enhance the Consistency Maintenance of Models.”  The abstract follows:

Consistency maintenance is paramount for software engineering, as it improves/guarantees the quality of artifacts (e.g., models) during maintenance and evolution. To perform this maintenance, consistency rules (CR) are commonly defined and applied to evaluate model elements according to desired properties. By empirical studies, it is known that CRs commonly evaluate similar model elements (e.g., multiple CRs checking the consistency of a UML class). Thus, we hypothesize that CRs can be used as a means to identify dependencies among inconsistencies and support consistency maintenance tasks. Currently, however, no study investigates to what extent dependencies can be identified and how they can be used to repair inconsistencies. In this paper, we explore dependencies between CRs to identify and group dependent inconsistencies. For that, we define a metamodel that allows dependencies to be expressed. Furthermore, we propose a consistency maintenance and dependency analysis mechanism that uses such a metamodel. Additionally, the approach generates repairs for the inconsistencies, considering the groups of dependencies to identify overlapping and conflicting repairs. To evaluate the approach, we conducted an empirical study with 48 UML models and 27 CRs. The results show that our approach identifies dependencies between inconsistencies (46% of the inconsistencies have dependencies), within a reasonable time, 10ms on average in the worst case. Results also show that dependent inconsistencies can be grouped and used together to identify repairs that are either overlapping (26% on average) or conflicting (58% on average).

To read the winning paper, click here.

The IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER) is the premier event on the theory and practice of recovering information from existing software and systems. The event explores innovative methods to extract the many kinds of information that can be recovered from software, software engineering documents, and systems artifacts, and examines innovative ways of using this information in system renewal and program understanding. SANER promotes discussion and interaction among researchers and practitioners about the development of maintainable systems, and the improvement, evolution, migration, and reengineering of existing systems. The venue also explores innovative methods of extraction for the many kinds of information of interest to software developers and examines innovative ways of using this information in system renewal and program understanding.

~coates~