A Systematic Review of the Literature of the Techniques to Perform Transformations in Software Engineering / Uma revisão sistemática da literatura das técnicas para realizar transformações na engenharia de software

Along with software evolution, developers may do repetitive edits. These edits can be identical or similar to different codebase locations, which may occur as developers add features, refactor, or fix a bug. Since some of these edits are not present in Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), they are often performed manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In order to help developers to apply repetitive edits, some techniques were proposed. In this work, we present a systematic review of the literature of the techniques to do transformations in software engineering. As a result, this systematic review returned 51 works ranging from the domains programming-by-examples, linked editing, API usage, bug fixing, complex refactoring, and complex transformations, which can be used to help tools' designer in the proposition of new approaches.  Along with software evolution, developers may do repetitive edits. These edits can be identical or similar to different codebase locations, which may occur as developers add features, refactor, or fix a bug. Since some of these edits are not present in Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), they are often performed manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In order to help developers to apply repetitive edits, some techniques were proposed. In this work, we present a systematic review of the literature of the techniques to do transformations in software engineering. As a result, this systematic review returned 51 works ranging from the domains programming-by-examples, linked editing, API usage, bug fixing, complex refactoring, and complex transformations, which can be used to help tools' designer in the proposition of new approaches.

A Study on Code Clone Management through Bidirectional Transformation

In software development, code clones are known to cause difficulty in maintaining software. One of the reasons is that it is difficult to systematically fix bugs that straddle code clones caused by copying code fragments containing bugs. Existing works supporting edits of code clones include synchronization based on difference between tokens after identifying code clones by tracing actions such as cutting, copying, and pasting that are performed while editing a program, and synchronization based on rules by comparing abstract syntax trees between code clones. However, no research clarifying the nature of code clone editing has been found. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism that flexibly and systematically edits code clones that maintain consistency by describing the consistency to be retained between abstract syntax trees of code clones by a bidirectional transformation language after identifying code clones by tracing actions such as cutting, copying, and pasting. Propagation of editing can be done selectively. In this thesis, after clarifying desirable formal properties in selective propagation, we show that the proposed mechanism actually satisfies its properties and demonstrate prototype implementation. Thus, our method enables an implementation of update propagation while maintaining consistentency of code clones

Cleaning up Copy-Paste Clones with Interactive Merging

International audienceCopy-paste-modify is a form of software reuse in which developers explicitly duplicate source code. This duplicated source code, amounting to a code clone, is adapted for a new purpose. Copy-paste-modify is popular among software developers, however, empirical evidence shows that it complicates software maintenance and increases the frequency of bugs. To allow developers to use copy-paste-modify without having to worry about these concerns , we propose an approach that automatically merges similar pieces of code by creating suitable abstractions. Because different kinds of abstractions may be beneficial in different contexts, our approach offers multiple abstraction mechanisms, which were selected based on a study of popular open-source repositories. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we have designed and implemented a prototype merging tool for C++ and evaluated it on a number of code clones exhibiting some variation, i.e near-miss clones, in popular Open Source packages. We observed that maintainers find our algorithmically created abstractions to be largely preferable to the existing duplicated code

Semi-Automatische Deduktion von Feature-Lokalisierung während der Softwareentwicklung: Masterarbeit

Despite extensive research on software product lines in the last decades, ad-hoc clone-and-own development is still the dominant way for introducing variability to software systems. Therefore, the same issues for which software product lines were developed in the first place are still imminent in clone-and-own development: Fixing bugs consistently throughout clones and avoiding duplicate implementation effort is extremely diffcult as similarities and differences between variants are unknown. In order to remedy this, we enhance clone-and-own development with techniques from product-line engineering for targeted variant synchronisation such that domain knowledge can be integrated stepwise and without obligation. Contrary to retroactive feature mapping recovery (e.g., mining) techniques, we infer feature-to-code mappings directly during software development when concrete domain knowledge is present. In this thesis, we focus on the first step towards targeted synchronisation between variants: the recording of feature mappings. By letting developers specify on which feature they are working on, we derive feature mappings directly during software development. We ensure syntactic validity of feature mappings and variant synchronisation by implementing disciplined annotations through abstract syntax trees. To bridge the mismatch between change classification in the implementation and abstract layer, we synthesise semantic edits on abstract syntax trees. We show that our derivation can be used to reproduce variability-related real-world code changes and compare it to the feature mapping derivation of the projectional variation control system VTS by Stanciulescu et al.Trotz umfangreicher Forschung zu Software-Produktlinien in den letzten Jahrzehnten ist Clone-and-Own immer noch der dominierende Ansatz zur Einführung von Variabilität in Softwaresystemen. Daher stehen bei Clone-and-Own immer noch die gleichen Probleme im Vordergrund, für die Software-Produktlinien überhaupt erst entwickelt wurden: Die konsistente Behebung von Fehlern in allen Klonen und die Vermeidung von doppeltem Implementierungsaufwand sind äußerst schwierig, da Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen den Varianten unbekannt sind. Um hier Abhilfe zu schaffen, erweitern wir die Clone-and-Own-Entwicklung mit Techniken aus der Produktlinien-Entwicklung zur gezielten Synchronisierung von Varianten, sodass Entwickler ihr Domänenwissen schrittweise und unverbindlich integrieren können. Im Gegensatz zu nachträglich arbeitenden Feature-Mapping-Recovery- oder auch Mining-Techniken, leiten wir Zuordungen von Features zu Quellcode direkt während der Softwareentwicklung ab, wenn konkretes Domänenwissen vorhanden ist. In dieser Arbeit entwickeln wir den ersten Schritt zur gezielten Synchronisation von Varianten: die Aufzeichnung von Feature-Mappings. Indem Entwickler spezifizieren an welchem Feature sie arbeiten, leiten wir Feature-Mappings direkt während der Softwareentwicklung ab. Wir stellen die syntaktische Korrektheit von Feature-Mappings und der Synchronisation von Varianten sicher, indem wir disziplinierte Annotationen mithilfe von abstrakten Syntaxbäumen implementieren. Um die Diskrepanz der Klassifizierung von Änderungen zwischen der Implementierungs- und der Abstraktionsschicht zu überbrücken, synthetisieren wir Semantic Edits auf abstrakten Syntaxbäumen. Wir zeigen, dass unsere Ableitung von Feature-Mappings in der Lage ist reale Codeänderungen zu reproduzieren und vergleichen sie mit der Feature-Mapping-Ableitung des Variationskontrollsystems VTS von Stanciulescu et al

Analyzing repetitiveness in big code to support software maintenance and evolution

Software systems inevitably contain a large amount of repeated artifacts at different level of abstraction---from ideas, requirements, designs, algorithms to implementation. This dissertation focuses on analyzing software repetitiveness at implementation code level and leveraging the derived knowledge for easing tasks in software maintenance and evolution such as program comprehension, API use, change understanding, API adaptation and bug fixing. The guiding philosophy of this work is that, in a large corpus, code that conforms to specifications appears more frequently than code that does not, and similar code is changed similarly and similar code could have similar bugs that can be fixed similarly. We have developed different representations for software artifacts at source code level, and the corresponding algorithms for measuring code similarity and mining repeated code. Our mining techniques bases on the key insight that code that conforms to programming patterns and specifications appears more frequently than code that does not. Thus, correct patterns and specifications can be mined from large code corpus. We also have built program differencing techniques for analyzing changes in software evolution. Our key insight is that similar code is likely changed in similar ways and similar code likely has similar bug(s) which can be fixed similarly. Therefore, learning changes and fixes from the past can help automatically detect and suggest changes/fixes to the repeated code in software development. Our empirical evaluation shows that our techniques can accurately and efficiently detect repeated code, mine useful programming patterns and API specifications, and recommend changes. It can also detect bugs and suggest fixes, and provide actionable insights to ease maintenance tasks. Specifically, our code clone detection tool detects more meaningful clones than other tools. Our mining tools recover high quality programming patterns and API preconditions. The mined results have been used to successfully detect many bugs violating patterns and specifications in mature open-source systems. The mined API preconditions are shown to help API specification writer identify missing preconditions in already-specified APIs and start building preconditions for the not-yet-specified ones. The tools are scalable which analyze large systems in reasonable times. Our study on repeated changes give useful insights for program auto-repair tools. Our automated change suggestion approach achieves top-1 accuracy of 45%-51% which relatively improves more than 200% over the base approach. For a special type of change suggestion, API adaptation, our tool is highly correct and useful