Since the introduction of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), software developers increasingly have to make privacy-related decisions during system design and implementation. However, past research showed that they often lack legal expertise and struggle with privacy-compliant development. To shed light on how effective current information sources are in supporting them with privacy-sensitive implementation, we conducted a qualitative study with 30 developers. Participants were presented with a privacy-sensitive scenario and asked to identify privacy issues and suggest measures using their knowledge, online resources, and an AI assistant. We observed developers' decision-making in think-aloud sessions and discussed it in follow-up interviews. We found that participants struggled with all three sources: personal knowledge was insufficient, web content was often too complex, and while AI assistants provided clear and user-tailored responses, they lacked contextual relevance and failed to identify scenario-specific issues. Our study highlights major shortcomings in existing support for privacy-related development tasks. Based on our findings, we discuss the need for more accessible, understandable, and actionable privacy resources for developers.
Intelligent services provide the power of AI to developers via simple RESTful API endpoints, abstracting away many complexities of machine learning. However, most of these intelligent services-such as computer vision-continually learn with time. When the internals within the abstracted 'black box' become hidden and evolve, pitfalls emerge in the robustness of applications that depend on these evolving services. Without adapting the way developers plan and construct projects reliant on intelligent services, significant gaps and risks result in both project planning and development. Therefore, h…
Software development is getting changed so rapidly. It will be highly benefited if we can accelerate software development process by guiding developers. Appropriate guidelines and accurate recommendations to developers during development process can reduce software development expenses, as well as can save valuable times of developers. There are a number of approaches to speed up the software development process. It can be done through code assistance tools that help developers by recommending relevant items from searching particular repository of Application Programming Interface (API). Some …
Building software systems often requires knowledge and skills beyond what developers already possess. In such cases, developers have to leverage different sources of information to seek help. A growing number of researchers and practitioners have started investigating what programming-related information developers seek during software development. However, being a high level and a type of the most important development-related information, architectural information search activity is seldom explored. To fill this gap, we conducted an industrial survey completed by 103 participants to understa…
Nowadays, it has become a basic need to reuse existing Application Programming Interface (API), Class Libraries, and frameworks for rapid software development. Software developers often reuse this by calling the respective APIs or libraries. But in doing so, developers usually encounter different problems in searching for appropriate code snippets. In most cases, API and Libraries are complex and not well structured or well documented. Online search engine consumes time in searching, yet match is not that relevant and representation is not good. To get a suggestion according to the query we ca…
Stack Overflow has been heavily used by software developers to seek programming-related information. More and more developers use Community Question and Answer forums, such as Stack Overflow, to search for code examples of how to accomplish a certain coding task. This is often considered to be more efficient than working from source documentation, tutorials or full worked examples. However, due to the complexity of these online Question and Answer forums and the very large volume of information they contain, developers can be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of available information. This makes…
Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to prefer general-purpose search engines like Google, which are often not optimized for code related documents and use search strategies and ranking techniques that are more optimized for generic, non-code related information. In this paper, we explore whether a general purpose search engine like Google is an optimal choice for code-related searches. In particula…
Engineering more secure software has become a critical challenge in the cyber world. It is very important to develop methodologies, techniques, and tools for developing secure software. To develop secure software, software developers need to think like an attacker through mining software repositories. These aim to analyze and understand the data repositories related to software development. The main goal is to use these software repositories to support the decision-making process of software development. There are different vulnerability databases like Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Common…
Software development has been changing rapidly. This development process can be influenced through changing developer friendly approaches. We can save time consumption and accelerate the development process if we can automatically guide programmer during software development. There are some approaches that recommended relevant code snippets and APIitems to the developer. Some approaches apply general code, searching techniques and some approaches use an online based repository mining strategies. But it gets quite difficult to help programmers when they need particular type conversion problems.…
Self-admitted technical debt (SATD) is a particular case of Technical Debt (TD) where developers explicitly acknowledge their sub-optimal implementation decisions. Previous studies mine SATD by searching for specific TD-related terms in source code comments. By contrast, in this paper we argue that developers can admit technical debt by other means, e.g., by creating issues in tracking systems and labelling them as referring to TD. We refer to this type of SATD as issue-based SATD or just SATD-I. We study a sample of 286 SATD-I instances collected from five open source projects, including Micr…
Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies and search for similar libraries implemented in the new technology. To assist with searching for these replacement libraries, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple ecosystems. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libra…
The Node.js Package Manager (i.e., npm) archive repository serves as a critical part of the JavaScript community and helps support one of the largest developer ecosystems in the world. However, as a developer, selecting an appropriate npm package to use or contribute to can be difficult. To understand what features users and contributors consider important when searching for a good npm package, we conduct a survey asking Node.js developers to evaluate the importance of 30 features derived from existing work, including GitHub activity, software usability, and properties of the repository and do…
Software developers often reuse code from online sources such as Stack Overflow within their projects. However, the process of searching for code snippets and integrating them within existing source code can be tedious. In order to improve efficiency and reduce time spent on code reuse, we present an automated code reuse tool for the Eclipse IDE (Integrated Developer Environment), NLP2TestableCode. NLP2TestableCode can not only search for Java code snippets using natural language tasks, but also evaluate code snippets based on a user's existing code, modify snippets to improve fit and correct …
In the component-based software development, the selection step is very important. It consists of searching and selecting appropriate software components from a set of candidate components in order to satisfy the developer-specific requirements. In the selection process, both functional and non-functional requirements are generally considered. In this paper, we focus only on the QoS, a subset of non-functional characteristics, in order to determine the best components for selection. The component selection based on the QoS is a hard task due to the QoS descriptions heterogeneity. Thus, we prop…
Developers spend a significant amount of time searching for code: e.g., to understand how to complete, correct, or adapt their own code for a new context. Unfortunately, the state of the art in code search has not evolved much beyond text search over tokenized source. Code has much richer structure and semantics than normal text, and this property can be exploited to specialize the code-search process for better querying, searching, and ranking of code-search results. We present a new code-search engine named Source Forager. Given a query in the form of a C/C++ function, Source Forager searche…
FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）；fortiss GmbH（福蒂斯有限公司）；Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA)（弗劳恩霍夫制造工程与自动化研究所（IPA））
This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work …
Reusing previously completed software repository to enhance the development process is a common phenomenon. If developers get suggestions from the existing projects they might be benefited a lot what they eventually expect while coding. The strategies available in this field have been rapidly changing day by day. There are a number of efforts that have been focusing on mining process and constructing repository. Some of them have emphasized on the web based code searching while others have integrated web based code searching in their customized tool. But web based approaches have inefficiency …
In model-driven development (MDD) software emerges by systematically transforming abstract models to concrete source code. Ideally, performing those transformations is to a large extent the task of code generators. One approach for developing a new code generator is to write a reference implementation and separate it into handwritten and generatable code. Typically, the generator developer manually performs this separation a process that is often time-consuming, labor-intensive, difficult to maintain and may produce more code than necessary. Software categories provide a way for separating cod…
Source code search plays an important role in software development, e.g. for exploratory development or opportunistic reuse of existing code from a code base. Often, exploration of different implementations with the same functionality is needed for tasks like automated software transplantation, software diversification, and software repair. Code clones, which are syntactically or semantically similar code fragments, are perfect candidates for such tasks. Searching for code clones involves a given search query to retrieve the relevant code fragments. We propose a novel approach called Clone-See…
Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) researchers study (open-source) project issues and the comments and threads within to discover -- among others -- challenges developers face when incorporating new technologies, platforms, and programming language constructs. However, such threads accumulate, becoming unwieldy and hindering any insight researchers may gain. While existing approaches alleviate this burden by classifying issue thread comments, there is a gap between searching popular open-source software repositories (e.g., those on GitHub) for issues containing particular keywords and feedin…
Improved software discovery is a prerequisite for greater software reuse: after all, if someone cannot find software for a particular task, they cannot reuse it. Understanding people's approaches and preferences when they look for software could help improve facilities for software discovery. We surveyed people working in several scientific and engineering fields to better understand their approaches and selection criteria. We found that even among highly-trained people, the rudimentary approaches of relying on general Web searches, the opinions of colleagues, and the literature were still the…
