Browsing by Author "Cossette, Bradley Edward"

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    Dependency Detection and Migration in Software Systems and Libraries
    (2014-10-01) Cossette, Bradley Edward; Walker, Robert James
    Software systems must change over time or risk becoming obsolete, but direct changes can impact dependent functionality. Software developers perform change impact analysis and redress using automated tools to identify dependency relationships affected by change, and to recommend adaptations. However, these tools are restricted in their application: dependency analysis tools are language-specific but many systems are implemented using multiple languages, while recommenders are poor at identifying adaptations for change impacts from external libraries. This work proposes using semi-automated approaches for supporting change impact analysis and redress, in which the developer is relied upon to provide key details of dependency syntax or examples of correct adaptations. From such information, tool support can be generated that is appropriately configured for the developer’s software, and that can be further refined by the developer through additional details or examples until it is sufficiently accurate for their needs. Four studies validate this thesis. The first involves the semi-automated DSKETCH tool for polylingual dependency analysis, which requires developers to detail only key syntax using a simplified notation; it then uses this syntax to identify where potential dependencies exist. Developers were able to successfully configure and use DSKETCH on polylingual systems with only a short period of training. The second study examines how software libraries and their application programming interfaces (APIs) evolve over successive versions. The study found that existing recommenders are generally unsuccessful, and that most observed changes could not be automatically migrated. The third study introduces the UMAMI tool that detects correspondences between the syntactic structure of the old API functionality and possible replacements in the new library version to recommend adaptations for API changes. The fourth study examines how change recommenders could be hybridized in a flexible fashion, by relying on developer-provided examples of correct redress of API changes to tailor recommendations to a library’s particular characteristics.