Historically, software testing received relatively less attention compared with other activities (e.g. systems analysis and design) of the software life cycle in an undergraduate computer science/information systems curriculum. Nevertheless, it is a common and important technique used to detect errors in software. This paper reports our recent experience of using a new approach to teaching soft...

Survey methodologists borrowed the think aloud method from cognitive psychology in order to make respondents’ thinking explicit in a variety of tasks. The method has become a central feature of cognitive interviewing to pretest questionnaires. In adapting the method for pretesting, survey researchers changed it in important ways that may have implications for data quality, either for better or ...

Software components o er numerous advantages in terms of development, but may give rise to ine ciency due to highly generic implementations. Program specialization can automatically remove overheads due to overly generic implementations, but requires inspection of the source code. To retain the advantages of black-box software components, we propose black-box program specialization: specializat...

System specification by state machines together with property specification and verification by temporal logics are by now standard techniques to reason about the control flow of hardware components and embedded systems. The techniques to reason about the dataflow within loosely coupled systems, however, are less well developed. In this contribution, we propose a formalism for the verification ...

Importance sampling is widely used in machine learning and statistics, but its power is limited by the restriction of using simple proposals for which the importance weights can be tractably calculated. We address this problem by studying black-box importance sampling methods that calculate importance weights for samples generated from any unknown proposal or black-box mechanism. Our method all...