Browsing by Author "Mondal, M."
Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Metadata only Connectivity of co-changed method groups: a case study on open source systems(IBM, 2012) Mondal, M.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.Software maintenance is an important and challenging phase of the software development life cycle because changes during this phase without proper awareness of dependencies among program modules can introduce faults in the software system. There is also a common intuition that cloned code introduces additional software maintenance challenges and difficulties. To support successful accomplishment of maintenance activities we consider two issues: (i) identifying coding characteristics that cause high source code modifications, and (ii) guidance for minimizing source code modifications. Focusing on these two issues we investigated the effects of method sharing (among different functionality) on method co-changeability and source code modifications. We proposed and empirically evaluated two metrics, (i) COMS (Co-changeability of Methods), and (ii) CCMS (Connectivity of Co-changed Method Groups). COMS measures the extent to which a method co-changes with other methods. CCMS quantifies the extent to which a particular functionality in a software system is connected with other functionality in that system. In other words CCMS measures the intensity of method sharing among different functionality or tasks (defined later). We investigated the impact of CCMS on COMS and source code modifications. Our comprehensive study on hundreds of revisions of six open source subject systems covering three programming languages (Java, C and C#) suggests that - (i) higher CCMS causes higher COMS as well as increased source code modifications, (ii) COMS in the cloned regions of a software system is negligible as compared to the COMS in the non-cloned regions, and (iii) in-spite of some issues (described later) cloning can be a possible way to reduce CCMS.Item Metadata only Dispersion of changes in cloned and non-cloned code(IEEE, 2012) Mondal, M.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.Currently, the impacts of clones in software maintenance activities are being investigated by different researchers in different ways. Comparative stability analysis of cloned and non-cloned regions of a subject system is a well-known way of measuring the impacts where the hypothesis is that, the more a region is stable the less it is harmful for maintenance. Each of the existing stability measurement methods lacks to address one important characteristic, dispersion, of the changes happening in the cloned and non-cloned regions of software systems. Change dispersion of a particular region quantifies the extent to which the changes are scattered over that region. The intuition is that, more dispersed changes require more efforts to be spent in the maintenance phase. Measurement of Dispersion requires the extraction of method genealogies. In this paper, we have measured the dispersions of changes in cloned and non-cloned regions of several subject systems using a concurrent and robust framework for method genealogy extraction. We implemented the framework on Actor Architecture platform which facilitates coarse grained parallellism with asynchronous message passing capabilities. Our experimental results on 12 open-source subject systems written in three different programming languages (Java, C and C#) using two clone detection tools suggest that, the changes in cloned regions are more dispersed than the changes in non-cloned regions. Also, Type-3 clones exhibit more dispersion as compared to the Type-1 and Type-2 clones. The subject systems written in Java and C show higher dispersions as well as increased maintenance efforts as compared to the subject systems written in C#.Item Metadata only An Empirical Study of the Impacts of Clones in Software Maintenance(IEEE, 2011) Mondal, M.; Rahman, M.S.; Saha, R.K.; Krinke, J.; Schneider, K.A.The impacts of clones on software maintenance is a long-lived debate on whether clones are beneficial or not. Some researchers argue that clones lead to additional changes during the maintenance phase and thus increase the overall maintenance effort. Moreover, they note that inconsistent changes to clones may introduce faults during evolution. On the other hand, other researchers argue that cloned code exhibits more stability than non-cloned code. Studies resulting in such contradictory outcomes may be a consequence of using different methodologies, using different clone detection tools, defining different impact assessment metrics, and evaluating different subject systems. In order to understand the conflicting results from the studies, we plan to conduct a comprehensive empirical study using a common framework incorporating nine existing methods that yielded mostly contradictory findings. Our research strategy involves implementing each of these methods using four clone detection tools and evaluating the methods on more than fifteen subject systems of different languages and of a diverse nature. We believe that our study will help eliminate tool and study biases to resolve conflicts regarding the impacts of clones on software maintenance.Item Metadata only Improving the detection accuracy of evolutionary coupling(IEEE, 2013) Mondal, M.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.If two or more program entities (e.g., files, classes, methods) co-change frequently during software evolution, these entities are said to have evolutionary coupling. The entities that frequently co-change (i.e., exhibit evolutionary coupling) are likely to have logical coupling (or dependencies) among them. Association rules and two related measurements, Support and Confidence, have been used to predict whether two or more co-changing entities are logically coupled. In this paper, we propose and investigate a new measurement, Significance, that has the potential to improve the detection accuracy of association rule mining techniques. Our preliminary investigation on four open-source subject systems implies that our proposed measurement is capable of extracting coupling relationships even from infrequently co-changed entity sets that might seem insignificant while considering only Support and Confidence. Our proposed measurement, Significance (in association with Support and Confidence), has the potential to predict logical coupling with higher precision and recall.Item Metadata only Insight into a method co-change pattern to identify highly coupled methods: An empirical study(IEEE, 2013) Mondal, M.; Roy, C.K.; Schneider, K.A.In this paper, we describe an empirical study of a unique method co-change pattern that has the potential to pinpoint design deficiency in a software system. We automatically identify this pattern by inspecting the method co-change history using reasonable constraints on method association rules. We also investigate the effect of code clones on the method co-changes identified according to the pattern, because there is a common intuition that clone fragments from the same clone class often require corresponding changes to ensure they remain consistent with each other. According to our in-depth investigation on hundreds of revisions of seven open-source software systems considering three types of clones (Type 1, Type 2, Type 3), our identified pattern helps us detect methods that are logically coupled with multiple other methods and that exhibit a significantly higher modification frequency than other methods. We call the methods detected by the pattern MMCGs (Methods appearing in Multiple Commit Groups) considering the pattern semantic. MMCGs can be considered as the candidates for restructuring in order to minimize coupling as well as to reduce the change-proneness of a software system. According to our observation, code clones have a significant effect on method co-changes as well as on MMCGs. We believe that clone refactoring can help us minimize evolutionary coupling among methods.