Software Engineering

Machine learning has the potential to significantly improve systems, but only under certain conditions. We describe a taxonomy to help identify whether or not machine learning should be applied to particular systems problems, and which approaches are most promising. We believe that this taxonomy can help practitioners and researchers decide how to most effectively use machine learning in their...

Software reuse is finally here but comes with risks.

Sanitizers are a relatively recent trend in software engineering. They aim at automatically finding bugs in programs, and they are now commonly available to programmers as part of compiler toolchains. For example, the LLVM project includes out-of-the-box sanitizers to detect thread safety (tsan), memory (asan,msan,lsan), or undefined behaviour (ubsan) bugs. In this article, we present nsan, a...

Code review is a powerful technique to ensure high quality software and spread knowledge of best coding practices between engineers. Unfortunately, code reviewers may have biases about authors of the code they are reviewing, which can lead to inequitable experiences and outcomes. In this paper, we describe a field experiment with anonymous author code review, where we withheld author identity...