Section: New Results

Software Quality: History and Changes

Tracking dependencies between code changes: An incremental approach. Merging a change often leads to the question of knowing what are the dependencies to other changes that should be merged too to obtain a working system. This question also arises with code history trackers – Code history trackers are tools that react to what the developer do by creating first-class objects that represent the change made to the system. We evaluate the capacity of different code history trackers to represent, also as first-class objects, the dependencies between those changes. We also present a representation for dependencies that works with the event model of Epicea, a fine-grained and incremental code history tracker. [32]

Mining Architectural Violations from Version History. Software architecture conformance is a key software quality control activity that aims to reveal the progressive gap normally observed between concrete and planned software architectures. However, formally specifying an architecture can be difficult, as it must be done by an expert of the system having a high level understanding of it. We present a lightweighted approach for architecture conformance based on a combination of static and historical source code analysis. The proposed approach relies on four heuristics for detecting absences (something expected was not found) and divergences (something prohibited was found) in source code based architectures. We also present an architecture conformance process based on the proposed approach. We followed this process to evaluate the architecture of two industrial-strength information systems, achieving an overall precision of 62.7% and 53.8%. We also evaluated our approach in an open-source information retrieval library, achieving an overall precision of 59.2%. We envision that aheuristic-based approach for architecture conformance can be used to rapidly raise architectural warnings, without deeply involving experts in the process. [22]