Mark van den Brand

Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

Software development is usually a collaborative venture. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no exception; indeed, by design, the OSS approach can accommodate teams that are more open, geographically distributed, and dynamic than commercial teams. This, we find, leads to OSS teams that are quite diverse. Team diversity, predominantly in offline groups, is known to correlate with team output, mostly with positive effects. How about in OSS? Using GitHub, the largest publicly available collection of OSS projects, we studied how gender and tenure diversity relate to team productivity and turnover. Using regression modeling of GitHub data and the results of a survey, we show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a sizable fraction of the data variability. These results can inform decision making on all levels, leading to better outcomes in recruiting and performance.

Repleo: a syntax-safe template engine

Templates are a very common solution to generate code. They are used for different tasks like rendering webpages, creating Java Beans and so on. Most template systems have no notion of the object language and just generate text. The drawback of this approach is the possibility to generate syntactical incorrect code. This can lead to all kinds of annoying errors. In this paper we present an approach for a syntax safe template engine. Syntax safety guarantees that the generated code can be correctly parsed. To ensure this we use the object language grammar to evaluate the template.

SQuAVisiT: A Flexible Tool for Visual Software Analytics

We present the Software Quality Assessment and Visualization Toolset (SQuAVisiT), a flexible tool for visual software analytics. Visual software analytics supports analytical reasoning about software systems facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. In particular, SQuAVisiT assists software developers, maintainers and assessors in performing quality assurance and maintenance tasks. Flexibility ofSQuAVisiT allows for integration of multiple programming languages and variety of analysis and visualization tools.SQuAVisiT has been successfully applied in a number of case studies, ranging from hundreds to thousands KLOC,from homogeneous to heterogeneous systems.

An action environment

Some basic programming constructs (e.g., conditional statements) are found in many different programming languages, and can often be included without change when a new language is designed. When writing a semantic description of a language, however, it is usually not possible to reuse parts of previous descriptions without change.This paper introduces a new Action Semantic Discription Formulation, ASDF, which has been designed specifically for giving reusable action semantic descriptions of individual language constructs. An initial case study in the use of ASDF has already provided reusable descriptions of all the basic constructs underlying Core ML.The paper also describes the Action Environment, a new environment supporting use and validation of ASDF descriptions. The Action Environment has been implemented on top of the ASF + SDF Meta-Environment, exploiting recent advances in techniques for integration of different formalisms, and inheriting all the main features of the Meta-Environment.

Extracting Models from ISO 26262 for Reusable Safety Assurance

As more and more complex software is deployed in safety-critical embedded systems, the challenge of assessing the safety of those systems according to the relevant standards is becoming greater. Due to the extensive manual work required, validating compliance of these systems with safety standards is an expensive and time-consuming activity; furthermore, as products evolve, re-assessment may become necessary. Therefore, obtaining reusable assurance data for safety assessment or re-assessment is very desirable. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach for assuring compliance with safety standards to facilitate reuse in the assessment, qualification and certification processes, using the automotive safety standard ISO 26262 as a specific example. Three different modeling techniques are described: A structure model is introduced to describe the overall structure of the standard; a rule-based technique is used for extracting the conceptual model from it; and a mapping to the software and systems process engineering metamodel provides a description of its processes. Finally, validation in the context of a concrete use case in the FP7 project OPENCOSS shows that the resulting models of our approach resemble the industrial models, but that they, inevitably, require the fine-tuning of domain experts.

Towards extended safety in connected vehicles

Current standards for vehicle safety consider only accidental failures; they do not consider failures caused by malicious attackers. The standards implicitly assume that the sensors and Electronic Control Units (ECUs) of each vehicle compose a secure in-vehicle network because no external entity communicates with the nodes of the network. These standards assume that safety and security aspects are independent. Connecting vehicles to external entities, e.g., through Vehicle to Mobile (V2M), Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I), proved to be useful: it enables using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications that improve our safety, efficiency, and comfort; but vulnerable to security threats. This paper provides an overview of AGORA framework: a framework generating secure and tested boiler-plate code needed for ITS applications, demonstrates that safety and security aspects in motor vehicles are not independent, and proposes extending safety assurance by considering security aspects. It also discusses a set of research challenges related to extended safety assurance in connected vehicles.

An Action Environment

Some basic programming constructs (e.g., conditional statements) are found in many different programming languages, and can often be included without change when a new language is designed. When writing a semantic description of a language, however, it is usually not possible to reuse parts of previous descriptions without change.This paper introduces a new formalism, ASDF, which has been designed specifically for giving reusable action semantic descriptions of individual language constructs. An initial case study in the use of ASDF has already provided reusable descriptions of all the basic constructs underlying Core ML.The paper also describes the Action Environment, a new environment supporting use and validation of ASDF descriptions. The Action Environment has been implemented on top of the ASF+SDF Meta-Environment, exploiting recent advances in techniques for integration of different formalisms, and inheriting all the main features of the Meta-Environment.

Conceptual Model of the Globalization for Domain-Specific Languages

Domain Specific Languages DSL have received some prominence recently. Designing a DSL and all their tools is still cumbersome and lots of work. Engineering of DSLs is still at infancy, not even the terms have been coined and agreed on. In particular globalization and all its consequences need to be precisely defined and discussed. This chapter provides a definition of the relevant terms and relates them, such that a conceptual model emerges. The authors think that this clarification of terms and the meaning will foster the field of efficient DSL definition and evolution in the future.

Model-Driven Software Engineering

Software plays an important role in designing and operating warehouses. However, traditional software engineering methods for designing warehouse software are not able to cope with the complexity, size, and increase of automation in modern warehouses. This chapter describes Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE), a discipline aimed at dealing with the increased complexity of software by focusing on the problem domain rather than on the solution domain. In warehouse design, this is achieved by using formal models to describe warehouses, and by using model transformations to transforms those models to, e.g. source code. MDSE relies on tools more than traditional software engineering. Thus, to reap the full benefits of MDSE, tools for developing, managing, and transforming models should be designed, implemented, used, and validated.

Automated Derivation of Translators From Annotated Grammars

In this paper we propose a technique to automate the process of building translators between operations languages, a family of DSLs used to program satellite operations procedures. We exploit the similarities between those languages to semiautomatically build a transformation schema between them, through the use of annotated grammars. To improve the overall translation process even more, reducing its complexity, we also propose an intermediate representation common to all operations languages. We validate our approach by semi-automatically deriving translators between some operations languages, using a prototype tool which we implemented for that purpose.