SUMMARYTraditional industrial practice often involves the ad hoc reuse of source code that was not designed for that reuse. Such pragmatic reuse tasks play an important role in disciplined software development. Pragmatic reuse has been seen as problematic due to a lack of systematic support, and an inability to validate that the reused code continues to operate correctly within the target system. Although recent work has successfully systematized support for pragmatic reuse tasks, the issue of validation remains unaddressed. In this paper, we present a novel approach and tool to semi‐automatically reuse and transform relevant portions of the test suite associated with pragmatically reused code, as a means to validate that the relevant constraints from the originating system continue to hold, while minimizing the burden on the developer. We conduct a formal experiment with experienced developers, to compare the application of our approach versus the use of a standard IDE (the ‘manual approach’). We find that, relative to the manual approach, our approach: reduces task completion time; improves instruction coverage by the reused test cases; and improves the correctness of the reused test cases. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) bridge the gap between the business model and the technical model. DSLs allow the technical developer to write programs with the business domain notations. This leads to higher productivity and better quality than General Purpose Languages (GPLs). One of the main challenges of utilizing DSLs in the current software process is how to reduce the implementation cost and the knowledge required for building and maintaining DSLs. Language workbenches are environments that provide high level tools for implementing different language aspects. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey on the different aspects of implementing DSLs. The survey includes structure, editor, semantics, and composability language aspects. Furthermore, it overviews the approaches used for each aspect and classify the current workbenches according to these approaches.

Software bug localization is an essential step within the software maintenance activity, consuming about 70% of the time and cost of the software development life cycle. Therefore, the need to enhance the automation process of software bug localization is important. This paper surveys various software bug localization techniques. Furthermore, a running motivational example is utilized throughout the paper. Such motivational example illustrates the surveyed bug localization techniques, while highlighting their pros and cons. The motivational example utilizes different software artifacts that get created throughout the software development lifecycle, and sheds light on those software artifacts that remain poorly utilized within existing bug localization techniques, regardless of the rich wealth of knowledge embedded within them. This research thus presents guidance on what artifacts should future bug localization techniques focus, to enhance the accuracy of bug localization, and speedup the software maintenance process.

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