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.

An automated refactoring approach to improve IoT software quality

Internet of Things (IoT) software should provide good support for IoT devices as IoT devices are growing in quantity and complexity. Communication between IoT devices is largely realized in a concurrent way. How to ensure the correctness of concurrent access becomes a big challenge to IoT software development. This paper proposes a general refactoring framework for fine-grained read-write locking and implements an automatic refactoring tool to help developers convert built-in monitors into fine-grained ReentrantReadWriteLocks. Several program analysis techniques, such as visitor pattern analysis, alias analysis, and side-effect analysis, are used to assist with refactoring. Our tool is tested by several real-world applications including HSQLDB, Cassandra, JGroups, Freedomotic, and MINA. A total of 1072 built-in monitors are refactored into ReentrantReadWriteLocks. The experiments revealed that our tool can help developers with refactoring for ReentrantReadWriteLocks and save their time and energy.This research is supported by the Guangdong Province Key Research and Development Plan (2019B010137004), the National Key research and Development Plan (2018YEB1004003), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1636215,61871140,61872100), in part by the Scientific Research Foundation of Hebei Educational Department under Grant ZD2019093, in part by the Fundamental Research Foundation of Hebei Province under Grant 18960106D, and Guangdong Province Universities and Colleges Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme (2019)

How do programs become more concurrent? A story of program transformations

ABSTRACT In the multi-core era, programmers need to resort to parallelism if they want to improve program performance. Thus, a major maintenance task will be to make sequential programs more concurrent. Must concurrency be designed into a program, or can it be retrofitted later? What are the most common transformations to retrofit concurrency into sequential programs? Are these transformations random, or do they belong to certain categories? How can we automate these transformations? To answer these questions we analyzed the source code of five open-source Java projects and looked at a total of 14 versions. We analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively the concurrency-related transformations. We found that these transformations belong to four categories: transformations that improve the responsiveness, the throughput, the scalability, or correctness of the applications. In 73.9% of these transformations, concurrency was retrofitted on existing program elements. In 20.5% of the transformations, concurrency was designed into new program elements. Our findings educate software developers on how to parallelize sequential programs, and provide hints for tool vendors about what transformations are worth automating

A Study and Toolkit for Asynchronous Programming in C#

Asynchronous programming is in demand today, because responsiveness is increasingly important on all modern devices. Yet, we know little about how developers use asynchronous programming in practice. Without such knowledge, developers, researchers, language and library designers, and tool vendors can make wrong assumptions. We present the first study that analyzes the usage of asynchronous programming in a large experiment. We analyzed 1378 open source Windows Phone (WP) apps, comprising 12M SLOC, produced by 3376 developers. Using this data, we answer 2 research questions about use and misuse of asynchronous constructs. Inspired by these findings, we developed (i) Asyncifier, an automated refactoring tool that converts callback-based asynchronous code to the new async/await; (ii) Corrector, a tool that finds and corrects common misuses of async/await. Our empirical evaluation shows that these tools are (i) applicable and (ii) efficient. Developers accepted 314 patches generated by our tools.published or submitted for publicationpeer reviewe

Refactoring Java Programs for Flexible Locking

Recent versions of the Java standard library offer flexible locking constructs that go beyond the language’s built-in monitor locks in terms of features, and that can be fine-tuned to suit specific appli-cation scenarios. Under certain conditions, the use of these con-structs can improve performance significantly, by reducing lock contention. However, the code transformations needed to con-vert between locking constructs are non-trivial, and great care must be taken to update lock usage throughout the program consis-tently. We present Relocker, an automated tool that assists program-mers with refactoring synchronized blocks into ReentrantLocks and ReadWriteLocks, to make exploring the performance tradeoffs among these constructs easier. In experiments on a collection of real-world Java applications, Relocker was able to refactor over 80% of built-in monitors into ReentrantLocks. Additionally, in most cases the tool could automatically infer the same ReadWriteLock usage that programmers had previously introduced manually