SHF: Small: Supporting Regular Expression Testing, Search, Repair, Comprehension, and Maintenance

SHF：小型：支持正则表达式测试、搜索、修复、理解和维护

• 批准号: 1714699
• 负责人: Kathryn Stolee
• 金额: $ 50万
• 依托单位: North Carolina State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-08-15 至 2022-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1714699&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Supporting; Regular; Expression

In software development, regular expressions are a common programming construct used for many purposes, including querying databases, searching documents, validating user input, and parsing files. Most programming languages have standard libraries or built-in support for regular expression processing. Despite their frequent appearance in software development activities, regular expressions are prone to programming errors. When a regular expression is responsible for a software bug, the impact can be severe, possibly resulting in corrupted data, security vulnerabilities, denial of service attacks, or website outages. This research develops new techniques to test, understand, reuse, and maintain regular expressions, in an effort to improve developer comprehension and reduce related bugs.The approach is to develop coverage criteria for test suites, similarity metrics, and semantics-preserving transformations for regular expressions. The coverage criteria apply to the automata representation of the regular expression and are used to automatically generate test inputs to help developers adequately test regular expressions. The similarity metrics allow developers to find regular expressions that are similar to a buggy regular expression, as well as explain how the behavior differs among them. The semantics-preserving transformations enhance comprehension and maintenance, and also support the migration of regular expressions between languages.  The broader impacts come primarily from the goal of reducing bugs related to regular expressions, which creates more reliable software for all.

在软件开发中，正则表达式是一种常见的编程结构，用于许多目的，包括查询数据库，搜索文档，验证用户输入和解析文件。大多数编程语言都有标准库或内置的正则表达式处理支持。尽管它们经常出现在软件开发活动中，但正则表达式很容易出现编程错误。当正则表达式导致软件错误时，影响可能会很严重，可能导致数据损坏，安全漏洞，拒绝服务攻击或网站中断。该研究开发了测试、理解、重用和维护正则表达式的新技术，以提高开发人员的理解能力并减少相关的bug。方法是开发测试套件的覆盖标准、相似性度量和正则表达式的语义保持转换。覆盖标准适用于正则表达式的自动机表示，并用于自动生成测试输入，以帮助开发人员充分测试正则表达式。相似性度量允许开发人员找到与有缺陷的正则表达式相似的正则表达式，并解释它们之间的行为差异。保留语义的转换增强了理解和维护，还支持正则表达式在语言之间的迁移。更广泛的影响主要来自减少与正则表达式相关的错误的目标，这为所有人创造了更可靠的软件。

项目成果

Check It Off: Exploring the Impact of a Checklist Intervention on the Quality of Student-authored Unit Tests

检查一下：探索检查表干预对学生编写的单元测试质量的影响

• DOI: 10.1145/3502718.3524799
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
• 作者: Bai, Gina R.;Presler-Marshall, Kai;Price, Thomas W.;Stolee, Kathryn T.
• 通讯作者: Stolee, Kathryn T.

10+ years of teaching software engineering with itrust: the good, the bad, and the ugly

与 itrust 一起教授软件工程 10 年：好的、坏的和丑陋的

• DOI: 10.1145/3183377.3183393
• 发表时间: 2018
• 期刊: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE SEET
• 作者: Heckman, Sarah;Stolee, Kathryn T.;Parnin, Christopher
• 通讯作者: Parnin, Christopher

An Empirical Study on Regular Expression Bugs

• DOI: 10.1145/3379597.3387464
• 发表时间: 2020-05
• 期刊: 2020 IEEE/ACM 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)
• 作者: Peipei Wang;Chris Brown;Jamie A. Jennings;Kathryn T. Stolee

Evaluating How Developers Use General-Purpose Web-Search for Code Retrieval

• DOI: 10.1145/3196398.3196425
• 发表时间: 2018-03
• 期刊: 2018 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)
• 作者: Md Masudur Rahman;J. Barson;Sydney Paul;Joshua Kayan;F. Lois;S. Quezada;Chris Parnin;Kathryn T. Stolee;Baishakhi Ray

Is Assertion Roulette still a test smell? An experiment from the perspective of testing education

断言轮盘赌仍然是一种测试气味吗？

• DOI: 10.1109/vl/hcc53370.2022.9833107
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: 2022 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
• 作者: Bai, Gina R.;Presler-Marshall, Kai;Fisk, Susan R.;Stolee, Kathryn T.
• 通讯作者: Stolee, Kathryn T.