MSR 2020
Mon 29 - Tue 30 June 2020
co-located with ICSE 2020
Tue 30 Jun 2020 11:12 - 11:24 at MSR:Zoom - Quality Chair(s): Jens Krinke

Understanding the nature of regular expression (regex) issues is important to tackle practical issues developers face in regular expression usage. Knowledge about the nature and frequency of various types of regular expression issues, such as those related to performance, API misuse, and code smells, for example, can guide testing, inform documentation writers, and motivate refactoring efforts. However, beyond ReDoS (Regular expression Denial of Service), little is known about to what extent regular expression issues affect software development and how these issues are addressed in practice.

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study of 350 merged regex-related pull requests (PRs) from Apache, Mozilla, Facebook, and Google GitHub repositories. Through classifying the root causes and manifestations of those bugs, we show that incorrect regular expression behavior is the dominant root cause of regular expression bugs (46.3%). The remaining root causes are incorrect API usage (9.3%) and other code issues that require regular expression changes in the fix (29.5%). By studying the code changes of regex-related pull requests, we observe that fixing regular expression bugs is nontrivial as it takes more time and more lines of code to fix them compared to the general pull requests. The results of this study contribute to a broader understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using regular expressions.

Tue 30 Jun

Displayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change

11:00 - 12:00
QualityTechnical Papers / Registered Reports / Keynote / MSR Awards / FOSS Award / Education / Data Showcase / Mining Challenge / MSR Challenge Proposals / Ask Me Anything at MSR:Zoom
Chair(s): Jens Krinke University College London

Q/A & Discussion of Session Papers over Zoom (Joining info available on Slack)

11:00
12m
Live Q&A
Beyond the Code: Mining Self-Admitted Technical Debt in Issue Tracker SystemsMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Laerte Xavier Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Fabio da Silva Ferreira , Rodrigo Brito , Marco Tulio Valente Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Pre-print Media Attached
11:12
12m
Live Q&A
An Empirical Study on Regular Expression BugsMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Peipei Wang North Carolina State University, USA, Chris Brown North Carolina State University, Jamie Jennings North Carolina State University, Kathryn Stolee North Carolina State University
Pre-print Media Attached
11:24
12m
Live Q&A
Do Explicit Review Strategies Improve Code Review Performance?MSR - Registered Reports
Registered Reports
A: Pavlína Wurzel Gonçalves , A: Enrico Fregnan , A: Tobias Baum , A: Kurt Schneider Leibniz Universität Hannover, Software Engineering Group, A: Alberto Bacchelli University of Zurich
Pre-print Media Attached
11:36
12m
Live Q&A
SoftMon: A Tool to Compare Similar Open-source Software from a Performance PerspectiveMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Pre-print Media Attached
11:48
12m
Live Q&A
A Study of Potential Code Borrowing and License Violations in Java Projects on GitHubMSR - Technical Paper
Technical Papers
Yaroslav Golubev JetBrains Research, ITMO University, Maria Eliseeva , Nikita Povarov JetBrains, Timofey Bryksin JetBrains Research, Saint Petersburg State University
Pre-print Media Attached