42,047 research outputs found
Comprehension and Maintenance of Large Scale Multi-Language Software Applications: Open Issues and Challenges
During the last decade, the number of software applications that have been deployed as a collection of components implemented in different programming languages and paradigms has increased considerably. When such applications are maintained, traditional program comprehension and reengineering techniques may not be adequate. In this context, this working session aims to stimulate discussion around key issues relating to the comprehension, reengineering, and maintenance of multi-language software applications. Such issues include, but are not limited to, the formalization, management, exploration, and presentation of multi-language program dependencies, as well as the development of practical toolsets for automating and easing the comprehension and maintenance of multi-language software
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
Structured Review of the Evidence for Effects of Code Duplication on Software Quality
This report presents the detailed steps and results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to investigate the evidence for the claim that code duplication has a negative effect on code changeability. This report contains only the details of the review for which there is not enough place to include them in the companion paper published at a conference (Hordijk, Ponisio et al. 2009 - Harmfulness of Code Duplication - A Structured Review of the Evidence)
Structured Review of Code Clone Literature
This report presents the results of a structured review of code clone literature. The aim of the review is to assemble a conceptual model of clone-related concepts which helps us to reason about clones. This conceptual model unifies clone concepts from a wide range of literature, so that findings about clones can be compared with each other
An Extended Stable Marriage Problem Algorithm for Clone Detection
Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens
intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned
software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses
on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision
of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage
problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different
files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using
a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of
clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 6 table
Community structure of complex software systems: Analysis and applications
Due to notable discoveries in the fast evolving field of complex networks,
recent research in software engineering has also focused on representing
software systems with networks. Previous work has observed that these networks
follow scale-free degree distributions and reveal small-world phenomena, while
we here explore another property commonly found in different complex networks,
i.e. community structure. We adopt class dependency networks, where nodes
represent software classes and edges represent dependencies among them, and
show that these networks reveal a significant community structure,
characterized by similar properties as observed in other complex networks.
However, although intuitive and anticipated by different phenomena, identified
communities do not exactly correspond to software packages. We empirically
confirm our observations on several networks constructed from Java and various
third party libraries, and propose different applications of community
detection to software engineering
Support for collaborative component-based software engineering
Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described.
This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject.
In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice.
Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects.
Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools).
Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying,
assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing.
Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation,
empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further
advances
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