Today, my paper: Making Offline Analyses Continuous has been accepted to ESEC/FSE 2013 New Ideas (NI) Track. The paper is in collaboration with Yuriy Brun, Alexandra Meliou.


The paper proposes to apply continuous testing techniques to databases to detect data entry errors where the user enters a valid but incorrect data to the database. Our prototype implementation, CDT, shows that the technique is feasible and imposes 13% overhead to normal database operations on average.

Let me start by saying that I only had one experience with http://www.abcgiftcards.com, and it was a bad experience. I know that one data point is not enough for generalization, but I still wanted other people to know my experience.

Background: I purchase considerable amount of stuff online, including digital media from iTunes. That is why, I try to track down discounts for iTunes gift cards. So far, I managed to get discounts up to 20%, which is quite nice when you think about it. I had experience with eBay and Best Buy with zero problems at all. I have bought around 10 iTunes gift cards from eBay and around 15 from Best Buy.

About one month ago, I decided to buy another gift card as my iTunes balance was close to hitting '0'. I searched Best Buy for discount, could not find any. I put some bids to eBay and again could not win. At that time, while searching the Internet for discounts, I find ABC Gift Cards. It looked legit, so I decided to give it a try. However, since this is my first time, I decided to buy $25 card, which had 7% discount at the time.

I received the code in a piece of paper attached to the receipt in one week. This gave the first warning. I understand that this web page buys and sells codes that are no longer wanted by the original owners, however why would not they send the original card? Do they buy codes from people without getting the original card and making sure that it is not scratched? If so, how do they even verify that the code is not used?

As expected the code did not work. iTunes told me that it has already been redeemed (but not by me). So, I decided to contact ABC Gift Cards customer service. After three days and leaving two messages to their customer services (because all customer  representatives were busy. I guess they either have very few customer  representatives, or they are having a lot of problems with the codes :-)), I finally talked with a customer representative and asked for refund. This was the response (more or less):
"Take a picture/scan of the receipt with the gift code clearly visible and send it to claims@abcgiftcard.com"
Looks simply, right? So, why this information is not available on the receipt, so that I could learn it without spending 3 days? Are they hoping that people will give up so that they don't have to refund eventually?

Unfortunately, the answer is I don't know. I am also not telling you whether to use or not use this service. Just realize that there are some sketchy things going on and know that for at least one person it did not work.

Have similar experience? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Last week, my recent paper: Making Offline Analyses Continuous has been accepted to ESEC/FSE 2013. The paper is in collaboration with Yuriy Brun, Michael D. Ernst, and David Notkin.


Put simply, the paper proposes a framework that considers existing analyses that work on program source code as black boxes. Using these black box analyses, then an author can implement a wrapper that transforms the analysis into an IDE-integrated continuous one. All ugly details about how concurrent developer edits are handled, when the analysis is run, and how the results are updated and shown to the developer are either completely handled by the framework or represented in the wrapper through a high-level API.

The framework is prototyped for Eclipse: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice
Also, check out the example continuous analyses implemented so far:

1. Continuous testing: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-testing
2. Continuous FindBugs: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-findbugs
3. Continuous PMD: https://bitbucket.org/kivancmuslu/solstice-continuous-pmd

The camera-ready version of the paper will be available soon (around July 1st, 2013), and I am looking for future extensions!