Section: New Results

Tools and Tool Infrastructure

Participants : Stéphane Ducasse, Veronica Uquillas-Gomez, Jannik Laval.

Reengineering large applications implies an underlying tool infrastructure that can scale and also be extended.

Ring: a Unifying Meta-Model and Infrastructure for Smalltalk Source Code Analysis Tools. Source code management systems record different versions of code. Tool support can then compute deltas between versions. To ease version history analysis we need adequate models to represent source code entities. As a first step to provide an infrastructure to support history analysis, this article [12] presents Ring, a unifying source code meta-model that can be used to support several activities and proposes a unified and layered approach to be the foundation for building an infrastructure for version and stream of change analyses. We re-implemented three tools based on Ring to show that it can be used as the underlying meta-model for remote and off-image browsing, scoping refactoring, and visualizing and analyzing changes. As a future work and based on Ring we will build a new generation of history analysis tools.

AspectMaps: A Scalable Visualization of Join Point Shadows. When using Aspect-Oriented Programming, it is sometimes difficult to determine at which join point an aspect executes. Similarly, when considering one join point, knowing which aspects will execute there and in what order is non- trivial. This makes it difficult to understand how the application will behave. A number of visualizations have been proposed that attempt to provide support for such program understanding. However, they neither scale up to large code bases nor scale down to understanding what happens at a single join point. In this paper [18] , we present AspectMaps - a visualization that scales in both directions, thanks to a multi-level selective structural zoom. We show how the use of AspectMaps allows for program understanding of code with aspects, revealing both a wealth of information of what can happen at one particular join point as well as allowing to see the “big picture” on a larger code base. We demonstrate the usefulness of AspectMaps on an example and present the results of a small user study that shows that AspectMaps outperforms other aspect visualization tools.

Challenges to support automated random testing for dynamically typed languages. Automated random testing is a proved way to identify bugs and precondition violations, and this even in well tested libraries. In the context of statically typed languages, current automated random testing tools heavily take advantage of static method declaration (argument types, thrown exceptions) to constrain input domains while testing and to identify errors. For such reason, automated random testing has not been investigated in the context of dynamically typed languages. We present the key challenges that have to be addressed to support automated testing in dynamic languages. [17]

SmartGroups, Focusing on Task-Relevant Source Artifacts in IDEs. Navigating large software systems, even when using a modern IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is difficult, since conceptually related software artifacts are distributed in a huge software space. For most software maintenance tasks, only a small fraction of the entire software space is actually relevant. The IDE, however, does not reveal the task relevancy of source artifacts, thus developers cannot easily focus on the artifacts required to accomplish their tasks. Smart Groups help developers to perform software maintenance tasks by representing groups of source artifacts that are relevant for the current task. Relevancy is determined by analyzing historical navigation and modification activities, evolutionary information, and runtime information. The prediction quality of Smart Groups is validated with a benchmark evaluation using recorded development activities and evolutionary information from versioning systems. [24]