About Me (resume)

I am a Ph.D. Candidate of Division of Computer & Information Sciences at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. I obtained my B.S. in 1997 and M.S. in 2000 from Department of Computer Science and Technology in Peking University. Then I worked as a system engineer at IBM China for a year. Now, I am pursuing my Ph.D. degree under guidance of Prof. Barbara G. Ryder.

Research

My research interest is programming languages and software engineering, including statice and dynamic program analysis, program understanding, program evolution, debugging tools and testing.

I am a member of PROLANGS research group. Currently, I am working on Change Impact Analysis project.

Software systems evolve over time in order to adapt to changes in the environment and to add desired functionality. Our goal is to help programmers understand the effects of changes they made. and to provide debugging support when changes unexpectedly lead to test failures.

We implemented a change impact analysis tool Chianti. Given an original and edited Java programs and the associated suite of tests, Chianti first analyzes the two versions of programs to obtain a set of inter-dependent atomic changes, then determines a subset of test suite that is potentially affected by the changes. For a given affected test, Chianti further determines a subset of changes that may have affected the behavior of the test, defined as affecting changes.

Based on Chianti, we developed other two tools: Crisp and JUnitCIA. Crisp helps programmers narrowing down the affecting changes of a failed test to the precise failure-inducing changes by creating the intermediate versions of the program. JUnitCIA defines several change classifiers that automatically label changes as Red, Yellow or Green, indicating the likelihood that they have contributed to a test failure.

This work is in collaboration with IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

Publications

Conferences

• Ophelia Chesley, Xiaoxia Ren, and Barbara Ryder, Crisp: A Debugging Tool for Java Programs, In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'05) (Budapest, Hungary, September 2005), pp. 401-410. .pdf
• Xiaoxia Ren, Barbara Ryder, Maximilian Storzer, and Frank Tip, Chianti: A Change Impact Analysis Tool for Java Programs In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'05) (Research demonstrations Session) (St. Louis, MO, USA, May 2005), pp. 664-665. .pdf
• Xiaoxia Ren, Fenil Shah, Frank Tip, Barbara Ryder, and Ophelia Chesley, Chianti: A Tool for Change Impact Analysis of Java Programs, In Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'04), (Vancouver, Canada, October 2004), pp. 432-448. .pdf

Technical reports

• Maximilian Stoerzer, Barbara Ryder, Xiaoxia Ren, Frank Tip, Finding Failure-Inducing Changes using Change Classification, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Number DCS-TR-582, September, 2005. Also appeared as IBM Research Report RC 23729. .pdf
• Ophelia Chesley, Xiaoxia Ren, and Barbara Ryder, Crisp: A Debugging Tool for Java Programs, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Number DCS-TR-573, April, 2005. .pdf
• Maximilian Stoerzer, Barbara G. Ryder, Xiaoxia Ren, and Frank Tip, Change Classification and its Applications to Program Development and Testing, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Number DCS-TR-572, April, 2005. .pdf
• Xiaoxia Ren, Fenil Shah, Frank Tip, Barbara G. Ryder, Ophelia Chesley, Chianti: A Tool for Change Impact Analysis of Java Programs, Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Number DCS-TR-551, April, 2004. .pdf
• Xiaoxia Ren, Fenil Shah, Frank Tip, Barbara G. Ryder, Ophelia Chesley, and Julian Dolby, Chianti: A Prototype Change Impact Analysis Tool for Java , Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Number DCS-TR-533, September, 2003. Also appeared as IBM Research Report RC 22983 and in Proceedings of the 2004 Mid-Atlantic Student Workshop on Programming Language and Systems (MASPLAS'04), April, 2004. .pdf

Activities

• Member of ACM, SIGSOFT.
• Reviwer for ICSE 2006, CC 2006, PASTE 2005, ISSTA 2004, ICSE 2003.

Links

Cartoon: Snoopy

Other

Here is my husband and my daughter Sophia. I passed my Ph.D. qualifying exam in May 2004. Courses I've taken. Just in case you are interested in my weekly schedule and what do I do in my leisure time.