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Tue 29 Apr 2025 14:00 - 14:06 at 212 - Session 3: Maintenance (talks and panel) Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik

Managing design-level complexity in industrial software systems remains challenging, often resulting in error-prone, difficult-to-maintain codebases. Despite extensive research on metrics and refactoring tools, architects frequently rely more on intuition than on algorithmic approaches, highlighting the need for approaches that better align with expert judgment. This research proposes that large language models (LLMs), trained specifically to generate a ``concern space,'' can organize program entities based on shared concerns, facilitating more meaningful metrics, refactoring suggestions, and system-level design views. Initial work with ConcernBERT, a purpose-trained LLM, shows significant advancements in representing cohesion over traditional concept-based methods. ConcernBERT uses a contrastive learning approach, where embeddings are learned by positioning entities addressing similar concerns close together while distancing unrelated ones. Complementing this, the Deicide algorithm identifies responsibility modules within classes, generating decomposition recommendations that align with historical maintenance patterns. Preliminary results are promising: ConcernBERT demonstrates strong performance in embedding entities by concern, closely aligning with expert-annotated ground truth. Future efforts will focus on applying these techniques across entire software systems.

Tue 29 Apr

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

14:00 - 15:00
Session 3: Maintenance (talks and panel)Doctoral Symposium at 212
Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology
14:00
6m
Talk
Concern-based Management of Software Design Complexity
Doctoral Symposium
Jason Lefever Drexel University
14:06
6m
Talk
Mitigating Waste That Tacitly Accrues in Continuous Integration Pipelines
Doctoral Symposium
Nimmi Rashinika Weeraddana University of Waterloo
Pre-print
14:12
6m
Talk
Automated Detection and Refactoring of Mock Clones in Java Projects
Doctoral Symposium
Gengwu Zhao Stevens Institute of Technology
14:18
6m
Talk
Practical Preprocessing of Logs at Scale
Doctoral Symposium
JianChen Zhao University of Waterloo
14:24
6m
Talk
Bridging the Gap Between Log Parsing Techniques and Practitioners: Challenges and Solutions
Doctoral Symposium
Hetong Dai University of Waterloo
14:30
30m
Panel
Panel: Maintenance
Doctoral Symposium
Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, Wesley Assunção Johannes Kepler University Linz, Hetong Dai University of Waterloo, Jason Lefever Drexel University, Nimmi Weeraddana University of Waterloo, JianChen Zhao University of Waterloo, Gengwu Zhao Stevens Institute of Technology
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