Empirical Software Engineering

doi: 10.1007/s10664-018-9631-8pmid: N/A

Washizaki, Hironori; Guéhéneuc, Yann-Gaël; Khomh, Foutse

doi: 10.1007/s10664-017-9592-3pmid: N/A

To support program comprehension, maintenance, and evolution, metamodels are frequently used during program reverse engineering activities to describe and analyze constituents of a program and their relations. Reverse engineering tools often define their own metamodels according to the intended purposes and features. Although each metamodel has its own advantages, its limitations may be addressed by other metamodels. Existing works have evaluated and compared metamodels and tools, but none have considered all the possible characteristics and limitations to provide a comprehensive guideline for classifying, comparing, reusing, and extending program metamodels. To aid practitioners and researchers in classifying, comparing, reusing, and extending program metamodels and their corresponding reverse engineering tools according to the intended goals, we establish a conceptual framework with definitions of program metamodels and related concepts. We confirmed that any reverse engineering activity can be clearly described as a pattern based on the framework from the viewpoint of program metamodels. Then the framework is used to provide a comprehensive taxonomy, named Program Metamodel TAxonomy (ProMeTA), which incorporates newly identified characteristics into those stated in previous works, which were identified via a systematic literature review (SLR) on program metamodels, while keeping the orthogonality of the entire taxonomy. Additionally, we validate the taxonomy in terms of its orthogonality and usefulness through the classification of popular metamodels.

Bavota, Gabriele; Greiler, Michaela

doi: 10.1007/s10664-018-9610-0pmid: N/A

Moonen, Leon; Rolfsnes, Thomas; Binkley, Dave; Alesio, Stefano

doi: 10.1007/s10664-017-9588-zpmid: N/A

The goal of Software Change Impact Analysis is to identify artifacts (typically source-code files or individual methods therein) potentially affected by a change. Recently, there has been increased interest in mining software change impact based on evolutionary coupling. A particularly promising approach uses association rule mining to uncover potentially affected artifacts from patterns in the system’s change history. Two main considerations when using this approach are the history length, the number of transactions from the change history used to identify the impact of a change, and history age, the number of transactions that have occurred since patterns were last mined from the history. Although history length and age can significantly affect the quality of mining results, few guidelines exist on how to best select appropriate values for these two parameters. In this paper, we empirically investigate the effects of history length and age on the quality of change impact analysis using mined evolutionary coupling. Specifically, we report on a series of systematic experiments using three state-of-the-art mining algorithms that involve the change histories of two large industrial systems and 17 large open source systems. In these experiments, we vary the length and age of the history used to mine software change impact, and assess how this affects precision and applicability. Results from the study are used to derive practical guidelines for choosing history length and age when applying association rule mining to conduct software change impact analysis.