Miguel Ventura

Miguel Terra-Neves, João Nadkarni, Miguel Ventura et al.

Visual Programming Languages (VPLs), coupled with the high-level abstractions that are commonplace in visual programming environments, enable users with less technical knowledge to become proficient programmers. However, the lower skill floor required by VPLs also entails that programmers are more likely to not adhere to best practices of software development, producing systems with high technical debt, and thus poor maintainability. Duplicated code is one important example of such technical debt. In fact, we observed that the amount of duplication in the OutSystems VPL code bases can reach as high as $39\%$. Duplicated code detection in text-based programming languages is still an active area of research with important implications regarding software maintainability and evolution. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature on duplicated code detection for VPLs is very limited. We propose a novel and scalable duplicated code pattern mining algorithm that leverages the visual structure of VPLs in order to not only detect duplicated code, but also highlight duplicated code patterns that explain the reported duplication. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on a wide range of real-world mobile and web applications developed using OutSystems.

Margarida Ferreira, Miguel Terra-Neves, Miguel Ventura et al.

Form validators based on regular expressions are often used on digital forms to prevent users from inserting data in the wrong format. However, writing these validators can pose a challenge to some users. We present FOREST, a regular expression synthesizer for digital form validations. FOREST produces a regular expression that matches the desired pattern for the input values and a set of conditions over capturing groups that ensure the validity of integer values in the input. Our synthesis procedure is based on enumerative search and uses a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver to explore and prune the search space. We propose a novel representation for regular expressions synthesis, multi-tree, which induces patterns in the examples and uses them to split the problem through a divide-and-conquer approach. We also present a new SMT encoding to synthesize capture conditions for a given regular expression. To increase confidence in the synthesized regular expression, we implement user interaction based on distinguishing inputs. We evaluated FOREST on real-world form-validation instances using regular expressions. Experimental results show that FOREST successfully returns the desired regular expression in 72% of the instances and outperforms REGEL, a state-of-the-art regular expression synthesizer.