Software Ticks Need No Specifications
(2021) 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE 2021- Abstract
- Software bugs cost time, money, and lives. They drive software research and development efforts, and are central to modern software engineering. Yet we lack a clear and general definition of what bugs are. Some bugs are defects, clearly defined as failures to meet some requirement or specification. However,there are many forms of undesirable program behaviour that are completely compatible with a typical program’s specification. In this paper, we argue that the lack of a criterion for identifying non-defect bugs is hampering the development of tools that find and fix bugs. We propose such a criterion, based on the idea of wasted effort, discuss how bugs that meet our definition of software ticks can complement defects, and sketch how our... (More)
- Software bugs cost time, money, and lives. They drive software research and development efforts, and are central to modern software engineering. Yet we lack a clear and general definition of what bugs are. Some bugs are defects, clearly defined as failures to meet some requirement or specification. However,there are many forms of undesirable program behaviour that are completely compatible with a typical program’s specification. In this paper, we argue that the lack of a criterion for identifying non-defect bugs is hampering the development of tools that find and fix bugs. We propose such a criterion, based on the idea of wasted effort, discuss how bugs that meet our definition of software ticks can complement defects, and sketch how our definition can help future work on software tools. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/f0620bad-888e-48fd-afed-e41a95ba31e6
- author
- Reichenbach, Christoph
LU
- organization
- publishing date
- 2021
- type
- Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding
- publication status
- published
- subject
- host publication
- Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering
- publisher
- IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
- conference name
- 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE 2021
- conference location
- Virtual
- conference dates
- 2021-05-23 - 2021-05-29
- external identifiers
-
- scopus:85115606079
- DOI
- 10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021
- project
- WASP startup package Christoph Reichenbach
- language
- English
- LU publication?
- yes
- id
- f0620bad-888e-48fd-afed-e41a95ba31e6
- date added to LUP
- 2021-02-27 11:17:26
- date last changed
- 2022-04-27 00:27:35
@inproceedings{f0620bad-888e-48fd-afed-e41a95ba31e6, abstract = {{Software bugs cost time, money, and lives. They drive software research and development efforts, and are central to modern software engineering. Yet we lack a clear and general definition of what bugs are. Some bugs are defects, clearly defined as failures to meet some requirement or specification. However,there are many forms of undesirable program behaviour that are completely compatible with a typical program’s specification. In this paper, we argue that the lack of a criterion for identifying non-defect bugs is hampering the development of tools that find and fix bugs. We propose such a criterion, based on the idea of wasted effort, discuss how bugs that meet our definition of software ticks can complement defects, and sketch how our definition can help future work on software tools.}}, author = {{Reichenbach, Christoph}}, booktitle = {{Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering}}, language = {{eng}}, publisher = {{IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.}}, title = {{Software Ticks Need No Specifications}}, url = {{https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/files/94565552/ticks_NIER.pdf}}, doi = {{10.1109/ICSE-NIER52604.2021.00021}}, year = {{2021}}, }