Fixr: Mining and Understanding Bug Fixes for App-Framework Protocol Defects

Abstract:
Developing interactive apps against event-driven software frameworks, like Android, is notoriously difficult. To create apps that behave as expected, developers must follow complex and often implicit asynchronous programming protocols. Such protocols intertwine the proper registering of callbacks to receive control from the framework with appropriate application-programming interface (API) calls that can then in turn affect the set of possible future callbacks. An app violates the protocol when, for example, it calls a particular API method in a state of the framework where making such a call is invalid. What makes verification and automated reasoning hard in this domain is largely what makes programming apps against such frameworks hard: the specification of the protocol is unclear, and the control flow is complex, asynchronous, and higher-order. In this talk, I present some of our efforts as part of the DARPA MUSE program in developing tools and techniques for finding and fixing bugs in event-driven mobile applications.

Bio:
Bor-Yuh Evan Chang (http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~bec) is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is interested in tools and techniques for building, understanding, and ensuring reliable computational systems. His techniques target using novel ways of interacting with the programmer to design more precise and practical program analyses. He joined the CU Boulder faculty in 2009 after receiving his Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.S. in 2002 from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award (2010).