IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

The IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) is an archival journal published bimonthly. We are interested in well-defined theoretical results and empirical studies that have potential impact on the construction, analysis, or management of software.
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From the January/February 2012 Issue...

GenProg: A Generic Method for Automatic Software Repair

By Claire Le Goues, ThanhVu Nguyen, Stephanie Forrest, and Westley Weimer

Featured article This paper describes GenProg, an automated method for repairing defects in off-the-shelf, legacy programs without formal specifications, program annotations, or special coding practices. GenProg uses an extended form of genetic programming to evolve a program variant that retains required functionality but is not susceptible to a given defect, using existing test suites to encode both the defect and required functionality. Structural differencing algorithms and delta debugging reduce the difference between this variant and the original program to a minimal repair. We describe the algorithm and report experimental results of its success on 16 programs totaling 1.25 M lines of C code and 120K lines of module code, spanning eight classes of defects, in 357 seconds, on average. We analyze the generated repairs qualitatively and quantitatively to demonstrate that the process efficiently produces evolved programs that repair the defect, are not fragile input memorizations, and do not lead to serious degradation in functionality.

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Editorials and Announcements

Announcement—eBooks of issues of TSE can now be downloaded from the Computer Society Digital Library

Editorial—State of the Journal (Jan/Feb 2012)
Guest Editors' Introduction—Special Section on the International Conference on Software Engineering (Jan/Feb 2012)
Guest Editors' Introduction—Special Section on Socio-Technical Environment of Software Development Projects (May/June 2011)
Editorial—Editorial: What Makes a Publication Archival? (March/April 2011)
Editorial—Editorial: State of the Journal (Jan/Feb 2011)
Guest Editors' Introduction—Search Based Software Engineering: Introduction to the Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Nov/Dec 2010)
Editorial—Editorial (Nov/Dec 2010)
Guest Editors' Introduction—2008 Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (Sept/Oct 2010)
Editorial—How Special Should Issues Be? (Jul/Aug 2010)
Guest Editors' Introduction—The Best Papers of ISSTA (Jul/Aug 2010)

Reviewers' List—The 2011 TSE Reviewers' List is now available. (PDF)
Annual Index—The 2011 TSE Annual Index is now available. (PDF)

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