International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering

In this paper, we use attribute grammars as a formal approach for model checkers development. Our aim is to design an Alternating-Time Temporal Logic (ATL) model checker from a context-free grammar which generates the language of the ATL formulae. An attribute grammar may be informally defined as a context-free grammar which is extended with a set of attributes and a collection of semantic rules. We provide a formal definition for an attribute grammar used as input for Another Tool for Language Recognition (ANTLR) to generate an ATL model checker. The original implementation of the model-checking algorithm is based on Relational Databases and Web Services. Several database systems and Web Services technologies were used for evaluating the system performance in verification of large ATL models.

With the gradual increase of network complexity and network scale in the cloud environment, Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of node failures has become a systematic problem of great research significance. This paper proposes Graph-Attention-Sage (GASage) algorithm, which is a fault RCA algorithm and scheme. The algorithm solves the RCA by incorporating TOPK sampling and Attention-Aggregation with GraphSage algorithm in large-scale and complex microservice network environment. The GASage algorithm is based on graph convolutional neural network and graph attention mechanism, which profoundly combines the characteristics of network fault RCA problems. TOPK sampling mechanism is applied in GASage to select the neighboring nodes with the top $K$ highest correlation as the objectives to be aggregated. GASage adopts an attention mechanism when aggregated, which aggregates the features of the central node according to the weights of the adjacent nodes and the central node. The weight aggregation method can greatly improve the node representation effect in the RCA scenario. The empirical results of our experiments have demonstrated that the model learned with GASage can outperform other model with the same learning framework and achieves more than 10% improvement in precision.

Software fault localization is notoriously tedious and time-consuming. Developed rapidly, machine learning techniques have been adopted for fault localization by researchers. Most existing approaches use the test coverage information as feature input to the learning model, ignoring the limited ability of the single-dimensional features. The effectiveness of fault localization is not greatly improved. To overcome the limitation, we propose a fault localization approach based on Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks (BiRNNs) and multi-dimensional features. Our approach collects suspiciousness-based, text similarity-based and fault-proneness-based features from the traditional fault localization areas and software metrics. To evaluate our approach, the experiments have been studied on the real-fault benchmark Defects4J and seeded fault program NanoXML. The experimental results show that our approach effectively improves fault localization accuracy.

API recommendation is crucial to improve programmers’ productivity. A lot of work has been proposed to improve the accuracy of API recommendations. In the existing work, many metrics, such as Precision, Recall, and MAP are used to evaluate the accuracy of the recommendation. These metrics can well reflect the ability to distinguish useful APIs from the candidate set, but they cannot evaluate the ability to determine the priority of useful APIs with each other. The priority between related APIs directly determines whether the recommended results are practical for developers. From this perspective, inspired by the sequence-aware recommendation, this paper constructs an API recommendation method with sequence awareness and designs new metrics to evaluate the method’s ability to determine the priority of useful APIs. The experimental results show that, compared with the baseline, the proposed method not only achieves better results on the common widely-used metrics but also outperforms the baseline method concerning the newly proposed sequence metrics.

Aiming at the limitations of existing algorithms of network intrusion detection in dealing with complex data of imbalance and high dimensionality, this paper proposes an intrusion detection algorithm based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM). First, the data-type conversion, oversampling technology and image data conversion are included in the data preprocessing to make the data balanced and adapt to the input format. Then, by the convolutional layer, pooling layer and fully connected layer of the CNN model, the main features are abstracted from the converted image data. Finally, data of the main features is used for training and testing the LightGBM model, so as to get the final classification results. This paper uses KDDCUP99 dataset to carry out multi-classification experiments. By comparing the experiments before and after balancing the dataset, and comparing with similar algorithms, it verifies the superiority of the proposed algorithm in the classification performance of intrusion detection, especially for the minority attack classes.

Finite State Machine is a popular modeling notation for various systems, especially software and electronic. Test paths (TPs) can be automatically generated from the system model to test such systems using a suitable algorithm. This paper presents a strategy that generates TPs and allows to start and end TPs only in defined states of the finite state machine. The strategy also simultaneously supports generating TPs only of length in a given range. For this purpose, alternative system models, test coverage criteria, and a set of algorithms are developed. The strategy is compared with the best alternative based on the reduction of the test set generated by the established N-switch coverage approach on a mix of 171 industrial and artificially generated problem instances. The proposed strategy outperforms the compared variant in a smaller number of TP steps. The extent varies with the used test coverage criterion and preferred TP length range from none to two and half fold difference. Moreover, the proposed technique detected up to 30% more simple artificial defects inserted into experimental SUT models per one test step than the compared alternative technique. The proposed strategy is well applicable in situations where a possible TP starts and ends in a state machine needs to be reflected and, concurrently, the length of the TPs has to be in a defined range.