A formal foundation for object-oriented software evolution

Mens, Tom

doi:10.1109/icsm.2001.972769

Cited by 28 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…This is, for example, the case if we want a merge tool that does not only deal with implementation artifacts but also with software artifacts in the higher life-cycle phases of software development. In such a case, a domain-independent approach is more suitable [14], [39], [43], [63]. Unfortunately, this typically results in a decreased accuracy.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A state-of-the-art survey on software merging

Mens

2002

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

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409

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AbstractÐSoftware merging is an essential aspect of the maintenance and evolution of large-scale software systems. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and analysis of available merge approaches. Over the years, a wide variety of different merge techniques has been proposed. While initial techniques were purely based on textual merging, more powerful approaches also take the syntax and semantics of the software into account. There is a tendency towards operation-based merging because of its increased expressiveness. Another tendency is to try to define merge techniques that are as general, accurate, scalable, and customizable as possible, so that they can be used in any phase in the software life-cycle and detect as many conflicts as possible. After comparing the possible merge techniques, we suggest a number of important open problems and future research directions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A state-of-the-art survey on software merging

Mens

2002

IIEEE Trans. Software Eng.

Self Cite

409

345

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“…The abstractness of category theory facilitates the description of domain independent expressions. It also can be used for composition mechanisms, to address scalability issues [32].…”

Section: Category Theory As Underlying Formalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontology-inferred phylogeny reconstruction for analyzing the evolutionary relationships between species: Ontological inference versus cladistics

Shaban-Nejad

Haarslev

2008

2008 8th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering

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Abstract-We propose the use of formal ontological inferencing, rather than cladistics, to reconstruct phylogeny trees and to analyze the evolutionary relationships between species. For this experiment, we focused on the phylogeny of fungi. Lexical chaining technique has been used for incremental population of evolving ontological elements. Also category theory has been employed to provide an underlying formalism for capturing and analyzing the evolutionary behavior of the system.

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“…Some syntactic merge tools focus on parse-trees or abstract syntax tree [Ask94,Gra92a,Yan94]. Other are based on graphs [Men99,RW98]. However, they cannot detect conflicts when the merged program is syntactically correct but semantically invalid.…”

Section: Software Mergingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated upgrading of component-based applications

Dig

Johnson

2006

Companion to the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications

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Software developers like to reuse software components such as libraries or frameworks because it lets them build a system more quickly, but then the system depends on the components that they reused. Ideally, the programming interface (API) to a component never changes. In practice, components change their APIs.Upgrading an application to the new API is error-prone, tedious, and disruptive to the development process.Although some tools and ideas have been proposed to solve the evolution of APIs, most upgrades are done manually. This makes maintaining software expensive. Our goal is to automate the upgrading and make it practical.Our study of the API changes in five components revealed that over 80% of the changes that break existing applications are caused by refactorings. Refactorings are program transformations that improve the structure of existing components. We suggest that refactoring-based upgrading tools can be used to effectively upgrade applications. We propose an approach that is both automated and safe, without any overhead on the component producers. First, component refactorings are automatically detected (either inferred or recorded), then they are incorporated into applications by replaying. This is the process used to automate the upgrading of applications: along with the new version of the component, component developers ship the log of refactorings applied to create the new version. An application developer can then upgrade the application to the new version by using a refactoring tool to replay the log of refactorings.We developed a toolset to automatically upgrade applications in response to component refactorings.First, we developed a record-and-replay extension to a refactoring engine which records component refactorings and replays them on the applications. To handle those cases when component refactorings are not recorded, we developed RefactoringCrawler, a tool that detects refactorings in Java components. The empirical evaluation of RefactoringCrawler shows that it scales to real-world components, and its accuracy in detecting refactorings is over 85%, a significant improvement over existing solutions.Not only components evolve, but applications evolve too. Besides refactorings, components and applicaii tions evolve through edits. Refactorings and edits can interfere with each other thus impeding the replay. To address this, we developed MolhadoRef, the first software merging system that intelligently merges refactorings and edits from components and applications, therefore upgrading the applications. Experimental evaluation shows that MolhadoRef automatically resolves more merge conflicts than traditional text-based systems while producing fewer merge errors.To address those cases when the source code of the application cannot be changed in response to component refactorings, we developed a tool, RefactoringBinaryAdapter (ReBA). ReBA automatically generates an adapter between component and application thus enabling old binary applications to run with the latest version of the ...

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A formal foundation for object-oriented software evolution

Abstract: My PhD thesis [7]

Cited by 28 publications

References 10 publications

A state-of-the-art survey on software merging

A state-of-the-art survey on software merging

Ontology-inferred phylogeny reconstruction for analyzing the evolutionary relationships between species: Ontological inference versus cladistics

Automated upgrading of component-based applications

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