Analogy-Making as a Core Primitive in the Software Engineering Toolbox

An analogy is an identification of structural similarities and correspondences between two objects. Computational models of analogy making have been studied extensively in the field of cognitive science to better understand high-level human cognition. For instance, Melanie Mitchell and Douglas Hofstadter sought to better understand high-level perception by developing the Copycat algorithm for completing analogies between letter sequences. In this paper, we argue that analogy making should be seen as a core primitive in software engineering. We motivate this argument by showing how complex software engineering problems such as program understanding and source-code transformation learning can be reduced to an instance of the analogy-making problem. We demonstrate this idea using Sifter, a new analogy-making algorithm suitable for software engineering applications that adapts and extends ideas from Copycat. In particular, Sifter reduces analogy-making to searching for a sequence of update rule applications. Sifter uses a novel representation for mathematical structures capable of effectively representing the wide variety of information embedded in software. We conclude by listing major areas of future work for Sifter and analogy-making in software engineering.Comment: Conference paper at SPLASH 'Onward!' 2020. Code is available at https://github.com/95616ARG/sifte

Semi-automating small-scale source code reuse via structural correspondence

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Pragmatic Software Reuse: A View from the Trenches

Software reuse has been a part of the software engineering field since its inception. Research on reuse has focused almost exclusively on pre-planned approaches. Relatively little has been written about reuse performed in the absence of its pre-planning: pragmatic reuse. While many academics have dismissed nonpre- planned reuse as ill-advised, very little evidence exists about it, especially with respect to industrial practice. We conducted a survey of 59 industrial software developers to capture the perception, frequency, motivations, difficulties, and execution of the practice of pragmatic reuse within their development activities. We found that the majority of developers surveyed perceive that: pragmatic reuse has an important place in their repertoire of techniques; pragmatic reuse tasks are a frequent part of their development activities; and that they face a variety of practical difficulties while performing pragmatic reuse tasks. Opinions vary on the range and scale of situations where pragmatic reuse is suitable.N

Using Structural Generalization to Discover Replacement Functionality for API Evolution

New versions of software libraries sometimes introduce incompatible and undocumented changes into their application programming interfaces (APIs). A developer whose software uses the API must determine how to migrate it in response. Existing approaches for determining migration paths are often of limited help, requiring speci c library characteristics, or resolving a small subset of actual changes. We present a new approach, matching via structural general- ization (MSG), that recommends replacement functionality from a new API version, based on its structural similarity to functionality removed from the old API. We rei ed our approach in a prototype API change recommendation tool called Umami, which we used to resolve binary incompatible changes in 20 Java library migrations, comparing its accuracy to other analysis and change recommendation techniques. Our results suggest MSG is complementary to existing approaches, providing useful results in API migration situations where the others fail.N

The End-to-End Use of Source Code Examples: An Exploratory Study - Appendix

This appendix contains the details of our case studies outlined in our paper for the 2009 International Conference on Software Maintenance, as well as an expanded discussion section. The reader is directed to the main paper for introduction, motivation, and related work.N