Learning programming is hard – teaching it well is even more challenging. At university, the focus is often on functional correctness and neglects the topic of clean and maintainable code, despite the dire need for developers with this skill set within the software industry. We present a feedbackdriven teaching concept for college students in their second to third year that we have applied and ...

An identifying code in a graph G is a set D of vertices such that the closed neighborhood of each vertex of the graph has a nonempty, distinct intersection with D. The minimum cardinality of an identifying code is denoted γ(G). Building upon recent results of Gravier, Moncel, and Semri, we show for n ≤ m that γID(Kn Km) = max{2m−n,m+⌊n/2⌋}. Furthermore, we improve upon the bounds for γ(G Km) an...

Managing technical debt effectively to prevent it from accumulating too quickly is of great concern to software stakeholders. To pay off technical debt regularly, software developers must be conscious of the existence of technical debt items. The first step is to make technical debt explicit; that is the identification of technical debt. Although there exist many kinds of static source code ana...

Motivated by the amount of code that goes unidentified on the web, we introduce a practical method for algorithmically identifying the programming language of source code. Our work is based on supervised learning and intelligent statistical features. We also explored, but abandoned, a grammatical approach. In testing, our implementation greatly outperforms that of an existing tool that relies o...

As new code-based defense technologies emerge, attackers move to data-only malware, which is capable of infecting a system without introducing any new code. To manipulate the control ow without code, data-only malware inserts a control data structure into the system, for example in the form of a ROP chain, which enables it to combine existing instructions into a new malicious program. Current s...

A set S of vertices of a graph G is a dominating set of G if every vertex u of G is either in S or it has a neighbour in S. In other words S is dominating if the sets S ∩N [u] where u ∈ V (G) and N [u] denotes the closed neighbourhood of u in G, are all nonempty. A set S ⊆ V (G) is called a locating code in G, if the sets S ∩ N [u] where u ∈ V (G) \ S are all nonempty and distinct. A set S ⊆ V ...

Source code author identification deals with identifying the most likely author of a computer program, given a set of predefined author candidates. There are several scenarios where digital evidence of this kind plays a role in investigation and adjudication, such as code authorship disputes, intellectual property infringement, tracing the source of code left in the system after a cyber attack,...

Source code author identification deals with identifying the most likely author of a computer program, given a set of predefined author candidates. There are several scenarios where digital evidence of this kind plays a role in investigation and adjudication, such as code authorship disputes, intellectual property infringement, tracing the source of code left in the system after a cyber attack,...

Many embedded systems require hard or soft real-time execution. To ensure the requirements are met, it is necessary to measure the execution time of individual tasks, as well as establish the overall real-time performance of the system. This paper presents a variety of techniques, at both coarse-grain and fine-grain levels, to measure execution time of both user code and operating system overhe...

Identifying the relationships among program elements is useful for program understanding, debugging, and analysis. One such relationship is synonymy. Function synonyms are functions that play a similar role in code, e.g. functions that perform initialization for different device drivers, or functions that implement different symmetric-key encryption schemes. Function synonyms are not necessaril...