Pub Date : 2007-10-22DOI: 10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362644
M. D. Penta, M. Harman, G. Antoniol, Fahim Qureshi
Brooks' milestone 'Mythical Man Month' established the observation that there is no simple conversion between people and time in large scale software projects. Communication and training overheads yield a subtle and variable relationship between the person-months required for a project and the number of people needed to complete the task within a given timeframe. This paper formalises several instantiations of Brooks' law and uses these to construct project schedule and staffing instances - using a search-based project staffing and scheduling approach - on data from two large real world maintenance projects. The results reveal the impact of different formulations of Brooks' law on project completion time and on staff distribution across teams, and the influence of other factors such as the presence of dependencies between work packages on the effect of communication overhead.
{"title":"The Effect of Communication Overhead on Software Maintenance Project Staffing: a Search-Based Approach","authors":"M. D. Penta, M. Harman, G. Antoniol, Fahim Qureshi","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362644","url":null,"abstract":"Brooks' milestone 'Mythical Man Month' established the observation that there is no simple conversion between people and time in large scale software projects. Communication and training overheads yield a subtle and variable relationship between the person-months required for a project and the number of people needed to complete the task within a given timeframe. This paper formalises several instantiations of Brooks' law and uses these to construct project schedule and staffing instances - using a search-based project staffing and scheduling approach - on data from two large real world maintenance projects. The results reveal the impact of different formulations of Brooks' law on project completion time and on staff distribution across teams, and the influence of other factors such as the presence of dependencies between work packages on the effect of communication overhead.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"4 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":"114639099","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.2007.4362616
S. Reiss
We describe an automated approach to finding code fragments that are unusual and hence might represent potential problems. Many potential problems in programs arise in code that is uncommon either because it represents rarely used constructs and hence is unfamiliar to the programmer, or because it represents a mistyping or other error that still happens to be legal code, albeit not very common. We present an approach that first finds what is "unusual" by reading a corpus of code and building a library of common patterns. The approach can then take any existing program and check if it contains any unusual patterns. We have run the system using a large corpus and have identified problems in a number of sample projects with otherwise working code.
{"title":"Finding Unusual Code","authors":"S. Reiss","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362616","url":null,"abstract":"We describe an automated approach to finding code fragments that are unusual and hence might represent potential problems. Many potential problems in programs arise in code that is uncommon either because it represents rarely used constructs and hence is unfamiliar to the programmer, or because it represents a mistyping or other error that still happens to be legal code, albeit not very common. We present an approach that first finds what is \"unusual\" by reading a corpus of code and building a library of common patterns. The approach can then take any existing program and check if it contains any unusual patterns. We have run the system using a large corpus and have identified problems in a number of sample projects with otherwise working code.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"299 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":"115828556","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.2007.4362615
Tibor Bakota, R. Ferenc, T. Gyimóthy
Although source code cloning (copy&paste programming) represents a significant threat to the maintainability of a software system, problems usually start to arise only when the system evolves. Most of the related research papers tackle the question of finding code clones in one particular version of the software only, leaving the dynamic behavior of the clones out of consideration. Eliminating these clones in large software systems often seems absolutely hopeless, as there might exist several thousands of them. Alternatively, tracking the evolution of individual clones can be used to identify those occurrences that could really cause problems in the future versions. In this paper we present an approach for mapping clones from one particular version of the software to another one, based on a similarity measure. This mapping is used to define conditions under which clones become suspicious (or "smelly") compared to their other occurrences. Accordingly, these conditions introduce the notion of dynamic clone smells. The usefulness of these smells is validated on the Mozilla Firefox internet browser, where the approach was able to find specific bugs that resulted from neglecting earlier copy&paste activities.
{"title":"Clone Smells in Software Evolution","authors":"Tibor Bakota, R. Ferenc, T. Gyimóthy","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362615","url":null,"abstract":"Although source code cloning (copy&paste programming) represents a significant threat to the maintainability of a software system, problems usually start to arise only when the system evolves. Most of the related research papers tackle the question of finding code clones in one particular version of the software only, leaving the dynamic behavior of the clones out of consideration. Eliminating these clones in large software systems often seems absolutely hopeless, as there might exist several thousands of them. Alternatively, tracking the evolution of individual clones can be used to identify those occurrences that could really cause problems in the future versions. In this paper we present an approach for mapping clones from one particular version of the software to another one, based on a similarity measure. This mapping is used to define conditions under which clones become suspicious (or \"smelly\") compared to their other occurrences. Accordingly, these conditions introduce the notion of dynamic clone smells. The usefulness of these smells is validated on the Mozilla Firefox internet browser, where the approach was able to find specific bugs that resulted from neglecting earlier copy&paste activities.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"21 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":"123434776","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.2007.4362632
A. Capiluppi, J. Fernández-Ramil
Accumulated changes on a software system are not uniformly distributed: some elements are changed more often than others. For optimal impact, the limited time and effort for complexity control, called anti-regressive work, should be applied to the elements of the system which are frequently changed and are complex. Based on this, we propose a maintenance guidance model (MGM) which is tested against real-world data. MGM takes into account several dimensions of complexity: size, structural complexity and coupling. Results show that maintainers of the eight open source systems studied tend, in general, to prioritize their anti-regressive work in line with the predictions given by our MGM, even though, divergences also exist. MGM offers a history-based alternative to existing approaches to the identification of elements for anti-regressive work, most of which use static code characteristics only.
{"title":"A model to predict anti-regressive effort in Open Source Software","authors":"A. Capiluppi, J. Fernández-Ramil","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362632","url":null,"abstract":"Accumulated changes on a software system are not uniformly distributed: some elements are changed more often than others. For optimal impact, the limited time and effort for complexity control, called anti-regressive work, should be applied to the elements of the system which are frequently changed and are complex. Based on this, we propose a maintenance guidance model (MGM) which is tested against real-world data. MGM takes into account several dimensions of complexity: size, structural complexity and coupling. Results show that maintainers of the eight open source systems studied tend, in general, to prioritize their anti-regressive work in line with the predictions given by our MGM, even though, divergences also exist. MGM offers a history-based alternative to existing approaches to the identification of elements for anti-regressive work, most of which use static code characteristics only.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"1 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":"122233426","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.2007.4362623
Sven Wenzel, Hermann Hutter, U. Kelter
In model-driven engineering developers work mainly or only with models, which exist in many versions. This paper presents an approach to trace single model elements or groups of elements within a version history of a model. It also offers analysis capabilities such as detection of logical coupling between model elements. The approach uses a differencing algorithm blown as SiDiff to identify similar elements in different versions of a model. SiDiff is highly configurable and thus our tracing approach can be adapted to all diagram types of the UML and to a large set of domain specific languages. The approach has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in that visualizes all relevant information about the traces and it allows developers to interactively explore details. It has been evaluated by several groups of test persons; they considered most of the functions of the tool to be very useful.
{"title":"Tracing Model Elements","authors":"Sven Wenzel, Hermann Hutter, U. Kelter","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362623","url":null,"abstract":"In model-driven engineering developers work mainly or only with models, which exist in many versions. This paper presents an approach to trace single model elements or groups of elements within a version history of a model. It also offers analysis capabilities such as detection of logical coupling between model elements. The approach uses a differencing algorithm blown as SiDiff to identify similar elements in different versions of a model. SiDiff is highly configurable and thus our tracing approach can be adapted to all diagram types of the UML and to a large set of domain specific languages. The approach has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in that visualizes all relevant information about the traces and it allows developers to interactively explore details. It has been evaluated by several groups of test persons; they considered most of the functions of the tool to be very useful.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"52 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":"133979770","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.2007.4362642
Árpád Beszédes, T. Gergely, J. Jász, Gabriella Tóth, T. Gyimóthy, V. Rajlich
In this paper, we introduce static execute after (SEA) relationship among program components and present an efficient analysis algorithm. Our case studies show that SEA may approximate static slicing with perfect recall and high precision, while being much less expensive and more usable. When differentiating between explicit and hidden dependencies, our case studies also show that SEA may correlate with direct and indirect class coupling. We speculate that SEA may find applications in computation of hidden dependencies and through it in many maintenance tasks, including change propagation and regression testing.
{"title":"Computation of Static Execute After Relation with Applications to Software Maintenance","authors":"Árpád Beszédes, T. Gergely, J. Jász, Gabriella Tóth, T. Gyimóthy, V. Rajlich","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362642","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we introduce static execute after (SEA) relationship among program components and present an efficient analysis algorithm. Our case studies show that SEA may approximate static slicing with perfect recall and high precision, while being much less expensive and more usable. When differentiating between explicit and hidden dependencies, our case studies also show that SEA may correlate with direct and indirect class coupling. We speculate that SEA may find applications in computation of hidden dependencies and through it in many maintenance tasks, including change propagation and regression testing.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"48 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":"122976497","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.2007.4362631
F. Deißenböck, S. Wagner, M. Pizka, S. Teuchert, J. Girard
Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine the software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that explicitly associates system properties with the activities carried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound quality criteria and allows to reason about their interdependencies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in industrial project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an explicit quality metamodel that supports its systematic construction and fosters preciseness as well as completeness. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of the model for the evaluation of the maintainability of Matlab Simulink models that are frequently used in model-based development of embedded systems.
{"title":"An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability","authors":"F. Deißenböck, S. Wagner, M. Pizka, S. Teuchert, J. Girard","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362631","url":null,"abstract":"Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine the software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that explicitly associates system properties with the activities carried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound quality criteria and allows to reason about their interdependencies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in industrial project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an explicit quality metamodel that supports its systematic construction and fosters preciseness as well as completeness. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of the model for the evaluation of the maintainability of Matlab Simulink models that are frequently used in model-based development of embedded systems.","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":"131549827","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.2007.4362627
J. Archuleta, E. Tilevich, Wu-chun Feng
Bioinformaticists use the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) to characterize an unknown sequence by comparing it against a database of known sequences, thus detecting evolutionary relationships and biological properties. mpiBLAST is a widely-used, high-performance, open-source parallelization of BLAST that runs on a computer cluster delivering super-linear speedups. However, the Achilles heel of mpiBLAST is its lack of modularity, thus adversely affecting maintainability and extensibility. Alleviating this shortcoming requires an architectural refactoring to improve maintenance and extensibility while preserving high performance. Toward that end, this paper evaluates five different software architectures and details how each satisfies our design objectives. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to using mixin layers to enable mixing-and-matching of modules in constructing sequence-search applications for a variety of high-performance computing systems. Our design, which we call "mixin layers with refined roles", utilizes mixin layers to separate functionality into complementary modules and the refined roles in each layer improve the inherently modular design by precipitating flexible and structured parallel development, a necessity for an open-source application. We believe that this new software architecture for mpiBLAST-2.0 will benefit both the users and developers of the package and that our evaluation of different software architectures will be of value to other software engineers faced with the challenges of creating maintainable and extensible, high-performance, bioinformatics software.
{"title":"A Maintainable Software Architecture for Fast and Modular Bioinformatics Sequence Search","authors":"J. Archuleta, E. Tilevich, Wu-chun Feng","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362627","url":null,"abstract":"Bioinformaticists use the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) to characterize an unknown sequence by comparing it against a database of known sequences, thus detecting evolutionary relationships and biological properties. mpiBLAST is a widely-used, high-performance, open-source parallelization of BLAST that runs on a computer cluster delivering super-linear speedups. However, the Achilles heel of mpiBLAST is its lack of modularity, thus adversely affecting maintainability and extensibility. Alleviating this shortcoming requires an architectural refactoring to improve maintenance and extensibility while preserving high performance. Toward that end, this paper evaluates five different software architectures and details how each satisfies our design objectives. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to using mixin layers to enable mixing-and-matching of modules in constructing sequence-search applications for a variety of high-performance computing systems. Our design, which we call \"mixin layers with refined roles\", utilizes mixin layers to separate functionality into complementary modules and the refined roles in each layer improve the inherently modular design by precipitating flexible and structured parallel development, a necessity for an open-source application. We believe that this new software architecture for mpiBLAST-2.0 will benefit both the users and developers of the package and that our evaluation of different software architectures will be of value to other software engineers faced with the challenges of creating maintainable and extensible, high-performance, bioinformatics software.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"7 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":"121098939","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.2007.4362630
Shan-Shan Hou, Lu Zhang, Tao Xie, Hong Mei, Jiasu Sun
Regression testing, which plays an important role in software maintenance, usually relies on test adequacy criteria to select and prioritize test cases. However, with the wide use and reuse of black-box components, such as reusable class libraries and COTS components, it is challenging to establish test adequacy criteria for testing software systems built on components whose source code is not available. Without source code or detailed documents, the misunderstanding between the system integrators and component providers has become a main factor of causing faults in component-based software. In this paper, we apply mutation on interface contracts, which can describe the rights and obligations between component users and providers, to simulate the faults that may occur in this way of software development. The mutation adequacy score for killing the mutants of interface contracts can serve as a test adequacy criterion. We performed an experimental study on three subject systems to evaluate the proposed approach together with four other existing criteria. The experimental results show that our adequacy criterion is helpful for both selecting good-quality test cases and scheduling test cases in an order of exposing faults quickly in regression testing of component-based software.
{"title":"Applying Interface-Contract Mutation in Regression Testing of Component-Based Software","authors":"Shan-Shan Hou, Lu Zhang, Tao Xie, Hong Mei, Jiasu Sun","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362630","url":null,"abstract":"Regression testing, which plays an important role in software maintenance, usually relies on test adequacy criteria to select and prioritize test cases. However, with the wide use and reuse of black-box components, such as reusable class libraries and COTS components, it is challenging to establish test adequacy criteria for testing software systems built on components whose source code is not available. Without source code or detailed documents, the misunderstanding between the system integrators and component providers has become a main factor of causing faults in component-based software. In this paper, we apply mutation on interface contracts, which can describe the rights and obligations between component users and providers, to simulate the faults that may occur in this way of software development. The mutation adequacy score for killing the mutants of interface contracts can serve as a test adequacy criterion. We performed an experimental study on three subject systems to evaluate the proposed approach together with four other existing criteria. The experimental results show that our adequacy criterion is helpful for both selecting good-quality test cases and scheduling test cases in an order of exposing faults quickly in regression testing of component-based software.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"240 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":"133390261","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.2007.4362621
V. Nagarajan, Rajiv Gupta, Matias Madou, X. Zhang, B. D. Sutter
In many application areas, including piracy detection, software debugging and maintenance, situations arise in which there is a need for comparing two versions of a program that dynamically behave the same even though they statically appear to be different. Recently dynamic matching [18] was proposed by us which uses execution histories to automatically produce mappings between instructions in the two program versions. The mappings then can be used to understand the correspondence between the two versions by a user involved in software piracy detection or a comparison checker involved in debugging of optimized code. However, if a program's control flow is substantially altered, which usually occurs in obfuscation or even manual transformations, mappings at instruction level are not sufficient to enable a good understanding of the correspondence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive dynamic matching algorithm with the focus on call graph and control flow matching. Our technique works in the presence of aggressive control flow transformations (both interprocedural such as function Mining/outlining and intraprocedural such as control flow flattening) and produces mappings of interprocedural and intraprocedural control flow in addition to mapping between instructions. We evaluated our dynamic matching algorithms by attempting to match original program with versions that were subjected to popular obfuscation and control flow altering transformations. Our experimental results show that the control flow mappings produced are highly accurate and complete, for the programs considered.
{"title":"Matching Control Flow of Program Versions","authors":"V. Nagarajan, Rajiv Gupta, Matias Madou, X. Zhang, B. D. Sutter","doi":"10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2007.4362621","url":null,"abstract":"In many application areas, including piracy detection, software debugging and maintenance, situations arise in which there is a need for comparing two versions of a program that dynamically behave the same even though they statically appear to be different. Recently dynamic matching [18] was proposed by us which uses execution histories to automatically produce mappings between instructions in the two program versions. The mappings then can be used to understand the correspondence between the two versions by a user involved in software piracy detection or a comparison checker involved in debugging of optimized code. However, if a program's control flow is substantially altered, which usually occurs in obfuscation or even manual transformations, mappings at instruction level are not sufficient to enable a good understanding of the correspondence. In this paper, we present a comprehensive dynamic matching algorithm with the focus on call graph and control flow matching. Our technique works in the presence of aggressive control flow transformations (both interprocedural such as function Mining/outlining and intraprocedural such as control flow flattening) and produces mappings of interprocedural and intraprocedural control flow in addition to mapping between instructions. We evaluated our dynamic matching algorithms by attempting to match original program with versions that were subjected to popular obfuscation and control flow altering transformations. Our experimental results show that the control flow mappings produced are highly accurate and complete, for the programs considered.","PeriodicalId":263470,"journal":{"name":"2007 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance","volume":"60 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":"121240115","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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