Using automated source code analysis for software evolution

Software maintenance is one of the most expensive and time-consuming phases in the software life-cycle. The size and complexity of commercial applications probably present the greatest difficulty that maintainers face when making changes to their applications. As a result of the corresponding loss of understanding, business knowledge encapsulated within the system becomes fragmented, and any changes made as a result of new business initiatives become difficult to implement and hence may mean a loss of business opportunities. This paper outlines an approach to regaining understanding of software which has been used in the Release project at Durham University. This approach involves determining the calling structure of a program in terms of a call-graph, and from this call-graph extracting a dominance tree. Various problems which have been encountered during the construction of tools to perform this task are described

COBOL systems migration to SOA: Assessing antipatterns and complexity

SOA and Web Services allow users to easily expose business functions to build larger distributed systems. However, legacy systems - mostly in COBOL - are left aside unless applying a migration approach. The main approaches are direct and indirect migration. The former implies wrapping COBOL programs with a thin layer of a Web Service oriented language/platform. The latter needs reengineering COBOL functions to a modern language/ platform. In our previous work, we presented an intermediate approach based on direct migration where developed Web Services are later refactored to improve the quality of their interfaces. Refactorings mainly capture good practices inherent to indirect migration. For this, antipatterns for WSDL documents (common bad practices) are detected to prevent issues related to WSDLs understanding and discoverability. In this paper, we assess antipatterns of Web Services’ WSDL documents generated upon the three migration approaches. In addition, generated Web Services’ interfaces are measured in complexity to attend both comprehension and interoperability. We apply a metric suite (by Baski & Misra) to measure complexity on services interfaces - i.e., WSDL documents. Migrations of two real COBOL systems upon the three approaches were assessed on antipatterns evidences and the complexity level of the generated SOA frontiers - a total of 431 WSDL documents.Fil: Mateos Diaz, Cristian Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Zunino Suarez, Alejandro Octavio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; ArgentinaFil: Flores, Andrés Pablo. Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Facultad de Informática. Departamento Ingeniería de Sistemas; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Patagonia Norte; ArgentinaFil: Misra, Sanjay. Atilim University; Turquía. Covenant University; Nigeri

Towards In-Transit Analytics for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, or Digital Manufacturing, is a vision of inter-connected services to facilitate innovation in the manufacturing sector. A fundamental requirement of innovation is the ability to be able to visualise manufacturing data, in order to discover new insight for increased competitive advantage. This article describes the enabling technologies that facilitate In-Transit Analytics, which is a necessary precursor for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) visualisation.Comment: 8 pages, 10th IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings-2017), Exeter, UK, 201

A method for re-modularising legacy code

This thesis proposes a method for the re-modularisation of legacy COBOL. Legacy code often performs a number of functions that if split, would improve software maintainability. For instance, program comprehension would benefit from a reduction in the size of the code modules. The method aims to identify potential reuse candidates from the functions re-modularised, and to ensure clear interfaces are present between the new modules. Furthermore, functionality is often replicated across applications and so the re-modularisation process can also seek to reduce commonality and hence the overall amount of a company's code requiring maintenance. A 10 step method is devised which assembles a number of new and existing techniques into an approach suitable for use by staff not having significant reengineering experience. Three main approaches are used throughout the method; that is the analysis of the PERFORM structure, the analysis of the data, and the use of graphical representations. Both top-down and bottom-up strategies to program comprehension are incorporated within the method as are automatable, and user controlled processes to reuse candidate selection. Three industrial case studies are used to demonstrate and evaluate the method. The case studies range in size to gain an indication of the scalability of the method. The case studies are used to evaluate the method on a step by step basis; both strong points and deficiencies are identified, as well as potential solutions to the deficiencies. A review is also presented to assesses the three main approaches of the methods; the analysis of the PERFORM and data structures, and the use of graphical representations. The review uses the process of software evolution for its evaluation using successive versions of COBOL software. The method is retrospectively applied to the earliest version and the known changes identified from the following versions are used to evaluate the re-modularisations. Within the evaluation chapters a new link within the dominance tree is proposed as is an approach for dealing with multiple dominance trees. The results show that «ach approach provides an important contribution to the method as well as giving a useful insight (in the form of graphical representations) of the process of software evolution

Inverse software configuration management

Software systems are playing an increasingly important role in almost every aspect of today’s society such that they impact on our businesses, industry, leisure, health and safety. Many of these systems are extremely large and complex and depend upon the correct interaction of many hundreds or even thousands of heterogeneous components. Commensurate with this increased reliance on software is the need for high quality products that meet customer expectations, perform reliably and which can be cost-effectively and safely maintained. Techniques such as software configuration management have proved to be invaluable during the development process to ensure that this is the case. However, there are a very large number of legacy systems which were not developed under controlled conditions, but which still, need to be maintained due to the heavy investment incorporated within them. Such systems are characterised by extremely high program comprehension overheads and the probability that new errors will be introduced during the maintenance process often with serious consequences. To address the issues concerning maintenance of legacy systems this thesis has defined and developed a new process and associated maintenance model, Inverse Software Configuration Management (ISCM). This model centres on a layered approach to the program comprehension process through the definition of a number of software configuration abstractions. This information together with the set of rules for reclaiming the information is stored within an Extensible System Information Base (ESIB) via, die definition of a Programming-in-the- Environment (PITE) language, the Inverse Configuration Description Language (ICDL). In order to assist the application of the ISCM process across a wide range of software applications and system architectures, die PISCES (Proforma Identification Scheme for Configurations of Existing Systems) method has been developed as a series of defined procedures and guidelines. To underpin the method and to offer a user-friendly interface to the process a series of templates, the Proforma Increasing Complexity Series (PICS) has been developed. To enable the useful employment of these techniques on large-scale systems, the subject of automation has been addressed through the development of a flexible meta-CASE environment, the PISCES M4 (MultiMedia Maintenance Manager) system. Of particular interest within this environment is the provision of a multimedia user interface (MUI) to die maintenance process. As a means of evaluating the PISCES method and to provide feedback into die ISCM process a number of practical applications have been modelled. In summary, this research has considered a number of concepts some of which are innovative in themselves, others of which are used in an innovative manner. In combination these concepts may be considered to considerably advance the knowledge and understanding of die comprehension process during the maintenance of legacy software systems. A number of publications have already resulted from the research and several more are in preparation. Additionally a number of areas for further study have been identified some of which are already underway as funded research and development projects

Interoperability and Standards: The Way for Innovative Design in Networked Working Environments

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityIn today’s networked economy, strategic business partnerships and outsourcing has become the dominant paradigm where companies focus on core competencies and skills, as creative design, manufacturing, or selling. However, achieving seamless interoperability is an ongoing challenge these networks are facing, due to their distributed and heterogeneous nature. Part of the solution relies on adoption of standards for design and product data representation, but for sectors predominantly characterized by SMEs, such as the furniture sector, implementations need to be tailored to reduce costs. This paper recommends a set of best practices for the fast adoption of the ISO funStep standard modules and presents a framework that enables the usage of visualization data as a way to reduce costs in manufacturing and electronic catalogue design.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Automatically Extracting Subroutine Summary Descriptions from Unstructured Comments

Summary descriptions of subroutines are short (usually one-sentence) natural language explanations of a subroutine's behavior and purpose in a program. These summaries are ubiquitous in documentation, and many tools such as JavaDocs and Doxygen generate documentation built around them. And yet, extracting summaries from unstructured source code repositories remains a difficult research problem -- it is very difficult to generate clean structured documentation unless the summaries are annotated by programmers. This becomes a problem in large repositories of legacy code, since it is cost prohibitive to retroactively annotate summaries in dozens or hundreds of old programs. Likewise, it is a problem for creators of automatic documentation generation algorithms, since these algorithms usually must learn from large annotated datasets, which do not exist for many programming languages. In this paper, we present a semi-automated approach via crowdsourcing and a fully-automated approach for annotating summaries from unstructured code comments. We present experiments validating the approaches, and provide recommendations and cost estimates for automatically annotating large repositories.Comment: 10 pages, plus references. Accepted for publication in the 27th IEEE International Conference on. Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering London, Ontario, Canada, February 18-21, 202