Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362640
A. Sutton, Jonathan I. Maletic
An in-depth investigation of C preprocessor usage for portability and configuration management is presented. Three heavily-ported and widely used C++ libraries are examined. A core set of header files responsible for configuration management is identified in each system. Then macro usage is extracted and analyzed both manually and with the help of program analysis tools. The configuration structure of each library is discussed in details and commonalities between the systems, including conventions and patterns are discussed. A common configuration architecture for managing portability concerns is derived and presented.
{"title":"How We Manage Portability and Configuration with the C Preprocessor","authors":"A. Sutton, Jonathan I. Maletic","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362640","url":null,"abstract":"An in-depth investigation of C preprocessor usage for portability and configuration management is presented. Three heavily-ported and widely used C++ libraries are examined. A core set of header files responsible for configuration management is identified in each system. Then macro usage is extracted and analyzed both manually and with the help of program analysis tools. The configuration structure of each library is discussed in details and commonalities between the systems, including conventions and patterns are discussed. A common configuration architecture for managing portability concerns is derived and presented.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116396072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362636
Shrinivas Joshi, A. Orso
Because of software's increasing dynamism and the heterogeneity of execution environments, the results of in-house testing and maintenance are often not representative of the way the software behaves in the field. To alleviate this problem, we present a technique for capturing and replaying partial executions of deployed software. Our technique can be used for various applications, including generation of test cases from user executions and post-mortem dynamic analysis. We present our technique and tool, some possible applications, and a preliminary empirical evaluation that provides initial evidence of the feasibility of our approach.
{"title":"SCARPE: A Technique and Tool for Selective Capture and Replay of Program Executions","authors":"Shrinivas Joshi, A. Orso","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362636","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362636","url":null,"abstract":"Because of software's increasing dynamism and the heterogeneity of execution environments, the results of in-house testing and maintenance are often not representative of the way the software behaves in the field. To alleviate this problem, we present a technique for capturing and replaying partial executions of deployed software. Our technique can be used for various applications, including generation of test cases from user executions and post-mortem dynamic analysis. We present our technique and tool, some possible applications, and a preliminary empirical evaluation that provides initial evidence of the feasibility of our approach.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122189884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362645
Jonathan Sillito, E. Wynn
Software maintenance is a highly collaborative activity whose social context is rarely addressed. To explore this context, we conducted an ethnographic study at a large technology company involving participant observation with software engineers. Thirty-six participants (nine managers and twenty-seven software engineers) at the company participated in semi-formal interviews, while six months of participant observation produced insights about the work practice. The paper presents nine key observations that demonstrate the social context of maintenance activities. These observations provide a description of how work was divided between groups, the social dependencies that exist between groups, challenges in managing branches, the role of small projects, issues of making cross-group changes to source code, how dependencies are identified, problems of confidence in testing, and the impacts of working across widely different time-zones. The paper also highlights implications these observations have for software engineering research and practice.
{"title":"The Social Context of Software Maintenance","authors":"Jonathan Sillito, E. Wynn","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362645","url":null,"abstract":"Software maintenance is a highly collaborative activity whose social context is rarely addressed. To explore this context, we conducted an ethnographic study at a large technology company involving participant observation with software engineers. Thirty-six participants (nine managers and twenty-seven software engineers) at the company participated in semi-formal interviews, while six months of participant observation produced insights about the work practice. The paper presents nine key observations that demonstrate the social context of maintenance activities. These observations provide a description of how work was divided between groups, the social dependencies that exist between groups, challenges in managing branches, the role of small projects, issues of making cross-group changes to source code, how dependencies are identified, problems of confidence in testing, and the impacts of working across widely different time-zones. The paper also highlights implications these observations have for software engineering research and practice.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129596957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362625
Michael Bowman, L. Briand, Y. Labiche
Class responsibility assignment is not an easy skill to acquire. Though there are many methodologies for assigning responsibilities to classes, they all rely on human judgment and decision making. Our objective is to provide decision-making help to re-assign methods and attributes to classes in a class diagram. Our solution is based on a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) and uses class coupling and cohesion measurement. Our MOGA takes as input a class diagram to be optimized and suggests possible improvements to it. The choice of a MOGA stems from the fact that there are typically many evaluation criteria that cannot be easily combined into one objective, and several alternative solutions are acceptable for a given OO domain model. This article presents our approach in detail, our decisions regarding the multi-objective genetic algorithm, and reports on a case study. Our results suggest that the MOGA can help correct suboptimal class responsibility assignment decisions.
{"title":"Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm to Support Class Responsibility Assignment","authors":"Michael Bowman, L. Briand, Y. Labiche","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362625","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362625","url":null,"abstract":"Class responsibility assignment is not an easy skill to acquire. Though there are many methodologies for assigning responsibilities to classes, they all rely on human judgment and decision making. Our objective is to provide decision-making help to re-assign methods and attributes to classes in a class diagram. Our solution is based on a multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) and uses class coupling and cohesion measurement. Our MOGA takes as input a class diagram to be optimized and suggests possible improvements to it. The choice of a MOGA stems from the fact that there are typically many evaluation criteria that cannot be easily combined into one objective, and several alternative solutions are acceptable for a given OO domain model. This article presents our approach in detail, our decisions regarding the multi-objective genetic algorithm, and reports on a case study. Our results suggest that the MOGA can help correct suboptimal class responsibility assignment decisions.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114352028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362634
Bradley Cossette, R. Walker
Software dependency analysis is an important step in determining the potential impact of changes. Existing tool support for conducting dependency analysis does not sufficiently support systems written in more than one language. Tools based on semantic analyses are expensive to create for combinations of multiple languages, while lexical tools provide poor accuracy and rely heavily on developer skill. This paper reports on an investigation into the application of a series of incrementally-better island grammars to an industrial, open-source polylingual system to determine the cost-to-accuracy relationship involved in developing and applying island grammars for dependency analysis. The results of our study suggest the effort-cost in writing richer island grammars rises faster than the resulting accuracy.
{"title":"Polylingual Dependency Analysis Using Island Grammars: A Cost Versus Accuracy Evaluation","authors":"Bradley Cossette, R. Walker","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362634","url":null,"abstract":"Software dependency analysis is an important step in determining the potential impact of changes. Existing tool support for conducting dependency analysis does not sufficiently support systems written in more than one language. Tools based on semantic analyses are expensive to create for combinations of multiple languages, while lexical tools provide poor accuracy and rely heavily on developer skill. This paper reports on an investigation into the application of a series of incrementally-better island grammars to an industrial, open-source polylingual system to determine the cost-to-accuracy relationship involved in developing and applying island grammars for dependency analysis. The results of our study suggest the effort-cost in writing richer island grammars rises faster than the resulting accuracy.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121582906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362651
G. D. Lucca, A. R. Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana
Analysis and classification of Web application user interfaces is a relevant problem in Web maintenance processes. This paper presents an approach for the reliable classification of HTML pages of a dynamic Web application. The approach is based on the assumption that groups of semantically equivalent built pages are characterized by the same key features which can be used for discriminating the pages. These features are obtained by an iterative process that exploits formal concept analysis for finding features that are specific for each class of pages. The process is supported by a toolkit that allows an effective definition of the discriminating features. The approach has been preliminarily validated with an experiment that produced encouraging results.
{"title":"Web Pages Classification using Concept Analysis","authors":"G. D. Lucca, A. R. Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362651","url":null,"abstract":"Analysis and classification of Web application user interfaces is a relevant problem in Web maintenance processes. This paper presents an approach for the reliable classification of HTML pages of a dynamic Web application. The approach is based on the assumption that groups of semantically equivalent built pages are characterized by the same key features which can be used for discriminating the pages. These features are obtained by an iterative process that exploits formal concept analysis for finding features that are specific for each class of pages. The process is supported by a toolkit that allows an effective definition of the discriminating features. The approach has been preliminarily validated with an experiment that produced encouraging results.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126495721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362646
S. McMaster, A. Memon
Test suite reduction seeks to reduce the number of test cases in a test suite while retaining a high percentage of the original suite's fault detection effectiveness. Most approaches to this problem are based on eliminating test cases that are redundant relative to some coverage criterion. The effectiveness of applying various coverage criteria in test suite reduction is traditionally based on empirical comparison of two metrics derived from the full and reduced test suites and information about a set of known faults: (1) percentage size reduction and (2) percentage fault detection reduction, neither of which quantitatively takes test coverage data into account. Consequently, no existing measure expresses the likelihood of various coverage criteria to force coverage-based reduction to retain test cases that expose specific faults. In this paper, we develop and empirically evaluate, using a number of different coverage criteria, a new metric based on the "average expected probability of finding a fault" in a reduced test suite. Our results indicate that the average probability of detecting each fault shows promise for identifying coverage criteria that work well for test suite reduction.
{"title":"Fault Detection Probability Analysis for Coverage-Based Test Suite Reduction","authors":"S. McMaster, A. Memon","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362646","url":null,"abstract":"Test suite reduction seeks to reduce the number of test cases in a test suite while retaining a high percentage of the original suite's fault detection effectiveness. Most approaches to this problem are based on eliminating test cases that are redundant relative to some coverage criterion. The effectiveness of applying various coverage criteria in test suite reduction is traditionally based on empirical comparison of two metrics derived from the full and reduced test suites and information about a set of known faults: (1) percentage size reduction and (2) percentage fault detection reduction, neither of which quantitatively takes test coverage data into account. Consequently, no existing measure expresses the likelihood of various coverage criteria to force coverage-based reduction to retain test cases that expose specific faults. In this paper, we develop and empirically evaluate, using a number of different coverage criteria, a new metric based on the \"average expected probability of finding a fault\" in a reduced test suite. Our results indicate that the average probability of detecting each fault shows promise for identifying coverage criteria that work well for test suite reduction.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132665024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362614
G. Antoniol, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, E. Merlo, P. Tonella
Identifiers represent an important source of information for programmers understanding and maintaining a system. Self-documenting identifiers reduce the time and effort necessary to obtain the level of understanding appropriate for the task at hand. While the role of the lexicon in program comprehension has long been recognized, only a few works have studied the quality and enhancement of the identifiers and no works have studied the evolution of the lexicon. In this paper, we characterize the evolution of program identifiers in terms of stability metrics and occurrences of renaming. We assess whether an evolution process similar to the one occurring for the program structure exists for identifiers. We report data and results about the evolution of three large systems, for which several releases are available. We have found evidence that the evolution of the lexicon is more limited and constrained than the evolution of the structure. We argue that the different evolution results from several factors including the lack of advanced tool support for lexicon construction, documentation, and evolution.
{"title":"Mining the Lexicon Used by Programmers during Sofware Evolution","authors":"G. Antoniol, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, E. Merlo, P. Tonella","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362614","url":null,"abstract":"Identifiers represent an important source of information for programmers understanding and maintaining a system. Self-documenting identifiers reduce the time and effort necessary to obtain the level of understanding appropriate for the task at hand. While the role of the lexicon in program comprehension has long been recognized, only a few works have studied the quality and enhancement of the identifiers and no works have studied the evolution of the lexicon. In this paper, we characterize the evolution of program identifiers in terms of stability metrics and occurrences of renaming. We assess whether an evolution process similar to the one occurring for the program structure exists for identifiers. We report data and results about the evolution of three large systems, for which several releases are available. We have found evidence that the evolution of the lexicon is more limited and constrained than the evolution of the structure. We argue that the different evolution results from several factors including the lack of advanced tool support for lexicon construction, documentation, and evolution.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"193 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133751186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362633
Bente Anda
Software maintenance is often expensive; hence, strategies for assessing the maintainability of complete software systems are important. Nevertheless, a software client usually has few means of assessing the maintainability of a software system as part of the acquisition process. Assessing the maintainability of complete systems is difficult due to the influence of many factors, such as the people, tasks and tools, in addition to the code. Furthermore, most research on maintainability focuses on individual classes of individual systems. This paper describes an empirical study in which the maintainability of four functionally equivalent systems developed in Java was assessed using both structural measures and expert assessments. The results suggest that such a combination may be useful. Although the assessment based on structural measures mostly corresponded with the expert assessments, there were several examples of potential problems regarding maintainability that were not captured by the structural measures.
{"title":"Assessing Software System Maintainability using Structural Measures and Expert Assessments","authors":"Bente Anda","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362633","url":null,"abstract":"Software maintenance is often expensive; hence, strategies for assessing the maintainability of complete software systems are important. Nevertheless, a software client usually has few means of assessing the maintainability of a software system as part of the acquisition process. Assessing the maintainability of complete systems is difficult due to the influence of many factors, such as the people, tasks and tools, in addition to the code. Furthermore, most research on maintainability focuses on individual classes of individual systems. This paper describes an empirical study in which the maintainability of four functionally equivalent systems developed in Java was assessed using both structural measures and expert assessments. The results suggest that such a combination may be useful. Although the assessment based on structural measures mostly corresponded with the expert assessments, there were several examples of potential problems regarding maintainability that were not captured by the structural measures.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133781074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362619
C. Oezbek, L. Prechelt
Many small and medium-sized systems have little or no design documentation, which makes program understanding during maintenance enormously more difficult when performed by outsiders. Thus, if only minimal design documentation is available, which form should it take to maximize its usefulness? We suggest that it is helpful if the documentation describes a tour through the source code, leading the user directly to relevant details. This work reports an evaluation of this conceptual idea in the form of a controlled experiment with 59 student subjects working on a difficult program understanding task in the context of the 27 KLOC JHotDraw graphics framework. One group received a plain text documentation, the other received tour-structured documentation which they navigated by using an Eclipse plugin called JTourBus that we constructed for the experiment. The results indicate that program understanding can be achieved somewhat faster (albeit not more correctly) with JTourBus than with a plain text document.
{"title":"JTourBus: Simplifying Program Understanding by Documentation that Provides Tours Through the Source Code","authors":"C. Oezbek, L. Prechelt","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362619","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362619","url":null,"abstract":"Many small and medium-sized systems have little or no design documentation, which makes program understanding during maintenance enormously more difficult when performed by outsiders. Thus, if only minimal design documentation is available, which form should it take to maximize its usefulness? We suggest that it is helpful if the documentation describes a tour through the source code, leading the user directly to relevant details. This work reports an evaluation of this conceptual idea in the form of a controlled experiment with 59 student subjects working on a difficult program understanding task in the context of the 27 KLOC JHotDraw graphics framework. One group received a plain text documentation, the other received tour-structured documentation which they navigated by using an Eclipse plugin called JTourBus that we constructed for the experiment. The results indicate that program understanding can be achieved somewhat faster (albeit not more correctly) with JTourBus than with a plain text document.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134074513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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