27,590 research outputs found
An Empirical Study of a Repeatable Method for Reengineering Procedural Software Systems to Object- Oriented Systems
This paper describes a repeatable method for reengineering a procedural
system to an object-oriented system. The method uses coupling metrics to assist a domain
expert in identifying candidate objects. An application of the method to a simple program
is given, and the effectiveness of the various coupling metrics are discussed. We perform
a detailed comparison of our repeatable method with an ad hoc, manual reengineering
effort based on the same procedural program. The repeatable method was found to be
effective for identifying objects. It produced code that was much smaller, more efficient,
and passed more regression tests than the ad hoc method. Analysis of object-oriented
metrics indicated both simpler code and less variability among classes for the repeatable
method
Evaluating Maintainability Prejudices with a Large-Scale Study of Open-Source Projects
Exaggeration or context changes can render maintainability experience into
prejudice. For example, JavaScript is often seen as least elegant language and
hence of lowest maintainability. Such prejudice should not guide decisions
without prior empirical validation. We formulated 10 hypotheses about
maintainability based on prejudices and test them in a large set of open-source
projects (6,897 GitHub repositories, 402 million lines, 5 programming
languages). We operationalize maintainability with five static analysis
metrics. We found that JavaScript code is not worse than other code, Java code
shows higher maintainability than C# code and C code has longer methods than
other code. The quality of interface documentation is better in Java code than
in other code. Code developed by teams is not of higher and large code bases
not of lower maintainability. Projects with high maintainability are not more
popular or more often forked. Overall, most hypotheses are not supported by
open-source data.Comment: 20 page
A practical guide to computer simulations
Here practical aspects of conducting research via computer simulations are
discussed. The following issues are addressed: software engineering,
object-oriented software development, programming style, macros, make files,
scripts, libraries, random numbers, testing, debugging, data plotting, curve
fitting, finite-size scaling, information retrieval, and preparing
presentations.
Because of the limited space, usually only short introductions to the
specific areas are given and references to more extensive literature are cited.
All examples of code are in C/C++.Comment: 69 pages, with permission of Wiley-VCH, see http://www.wiley-vch.de
(some screenshots with poor quality due to arXiv size restrictions) A
comprehensively extended version will appear in spring 2009 as book at
Word-Scientific, see http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/6988.htm
Stack Overflow: A Code Laundering Platform?
Developers use Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to exchange knowledge and
expertise. Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A website where developers discuss
coding problems and share code examples. Although all Stack Overflow posts are
free to access, code examples on Stack Overflow are governed by the Creative
Commons Attribute-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license that developers should obey
when reusing code from Stack Overflow or posting code to Stack Overflow. In
this paper, we conduct a case study with 399 Android apps, to investigate
whether developers respect license terms when reusing code from Stack Overflow
posts (and the other way around). We found 232 code snippets in 62 Android apps
from our dataset that were potentially reused from Stack Overflow, and 1,226
Stack Overflow posts containing code examples that are clones of code released
in 68 Android apps, suggesting that developers may have copied the code of
these apps to answer Stack Overflow questions. We investigated the licenses of
these pieces of code and observed 1,279 cases of potential license violations
(related to code posting to Stack overflow or code reuse from Stack overflow).
This paper aims to raise the awareness of the software engineering community
about potential unethical code reuse activities taking place on Q&A websites
like Stack Overflow.Comment: In proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software
Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER
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