10,371 research outputs found
Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution
During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of software
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)
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Some issues in the 'archaeology' of software evolution
During a software project's lifetime, the software goes through many changes, as components are added, removed and modified to fix bugs and add new features. This paper is intended as a lightweight introduction to some of the issues arising from an `archaeological' investigation of software evolution. We use our own work to look at some of the challenges faced, techniques used, findings obtained, and lessons learnt when measuring and visualising the historical changes that happen during the evolution of 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 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
BCFA: Bespoke Control Flow Analysis for CFA at Scale
Many data-driven software engineering tasks such as discovering programming
patterns, mining API specifications, etc., perform source code analysis over
control flow graphs (CFGs) at scale. Analyzing millions of CFGs can be
expensive and performance of the analysis heavily depends on the underlying CFG
traversal strategy. State-of-the-art analysis frameworks use a fixed traversal
strategy. We argue that a single traversal strategy does not fit all kinds of
analyses and CFGs and propose bespoke control flow analysis (BCFA). Given a
control flow analysis (CFA) and a large number of CFGs, BCFA selects the most
efficient traversal strategy for each CFG. BCFA extracts a set of properties of
the CFA by analyzing the code of the CFA and combines it with properties of the
CFG, such as branching factor and cyclicity, for selecting the optimal
traversal strategy. We have implemented BCFA in Boa, and evaluated BCFA using a
set of representative static analyses that mainly involve traversing CFGs and
two large datasets containing 287 thousand and 162 million CFGs. Our results
show that BCFA can speedup the large scale analyses by 1%-28%. Further, BCFA
has low overheads; less than 0.2%, and low misprediction rate; less than 0.01%.Comment: 12 page
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