Duplicated code pattern mining in visual programming languages

Abstract

Visual Programming Languages (VPLs), coupled with the high-level abstractions that are commonplace in visual programming environments, enable users with less technical knowledge to become proficient programmers. However, the lower skill floor required by VPLs also entails that programmers are more likely to not adhere to best practices of software development, producing systems with high technical debt, and thus poor maintainability. Duplicated code is one important example of such technical debt. In fact, we observed that the amount of duplication in the OutSystems VPL code bases can reach as high as 39%.Duplicated code detection in text-based programming languages is still an active area of research with important implications regarding software maintainability and evolution. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature on duplicated code detection for VPLs is very limited. We propose a novel and scalable duplicated code pattern mining algorithm that leverages the visual structure of VPLs in order to not only detect duplicated code, but also highlight duplicated code patterns that explain the reported duplication. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on a wide range of real-world mobile and web applications developed using OutSystems. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Maintaining software; Software verification and validation; • Theory of computation → Automated reasoning. * This is an extended version of a paper accepted for publication in the industrial track of the Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2021.

SAT-Based Algorithms for Regular Graph Pattern Matching

“…The base encoding is an adaptation of an encoding for maximum common subgraph available in the literature (Feng et al 2017;Terra-Neves et al 2021). It solves the original problem by mapping the nodes and edges of G into those of P .…”