Reverse-Engineering Reusable Language Modules from Legacy Domain-Specific Languages

Méndez-Acuña, David; Galindo, José; Combemale, Benôıt; Blouin, Arnaud; Baudry, Benoît; Guernic, Gurvan Le

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-35122-3_24

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Rubin et al call them parts, regions, or diff-sets alluding to the technique used to retrieve them [58]. Other example of generic names are modules by Méndez-Acuña et al [59] or clusters by Yang et al [60] and Araar et al [61]. Other employed terminology is less generic and they specifically refers to the concrete artefact types that they are dealing with.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature location benchmark for extractive software product line adoption research using realistic and synthetic Eclipse variants

Martínez

Ziadi

Papadakis

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

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Context: It is common belief that high impact research in software reuse requires assessment in non-trivial, comparable, and reproducible settings. However, software artefacts and common representations are usually unavailable. Also, establishing a representative ground truth is a challenging and debatable subject. Feature location in the context of software families, which is key for software product line adoption, is a research field that is becoming more mature with a high proliferation of techniques. Objective: We present EFLBench, a benchmark and a framework to provide a common ground for the evaluation of feature location techniques in families of systems. Method: EFLBench leverages the efforts made by the Eclipse Community which provides feature-based family artefacts and their plugin-based implementations. Eclipse is an active and non-trivial project and thus, it establishes an unbiased ground truth which is realistic and challenging. Results: EFLBench is publicly available and supports all tasks for feature location techniques integration, benchmark construction and benchmark usage. We demonstrate its usage, simplicity and reproducibility by comparing four techniques in Eclipse releases. As an extension of our previously published work, we consider a decade of Eclipse releases and we also contribute an approach to automatically generate synthetic Eclipse variants to benchmark feature location techniques in tailored settings. We present and discuss three strategies for this automatic generation and we present the results using different settings. Conclusion: EFLBench is a contribution to foster the research in feature location in families of systems providing a common framework and a set of baseline techniques and results.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature location benchmark for extractive software product line adoption research using realistic and synthetic Eclipse variants

Martínez

Ziadi

Papadakis

et al. 2018

Information and Software Technology

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“…Puzzle enables a reverse engineering process to extract reusable language modules from the detected specification clones [8]. This strategy is based on a principle illustrated in Fig.…”

Section: Extraction Of Reusable Language Modulesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Puzzle: A Tool for Analyzing and Extracting Specification Clones in DSLs

Méndez-Acuña

Galindo

Combemale

et al. 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) is a successful technique in the development of complex systems. Indeed, the construction of new DSLs addressing the particular needs of software projects has become a recurrent activity. In this context, the phenomenon of specification cloning has started to appear. Language designers often copy&paste some parts of the specification from legacy DSLs to "reuse" formerly defined language constructs. As well known, this type of practices introduce problems such as bugs propagation, thus increasing of maintenance costs. In this paper, we present Puzzle, a tool that uses static analysis to facilitate the detection of specification clones in DSLs implemented under the executable metamodeling paradigm. Puzzle also enables the extraction specification clones as reusable language modules that can be later used to build up new DSLs.

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“…In a previous work [17,18] we introduced an approach to automatically infer a language modular design from a given set of DSL variants. In this article we extend that work to provide a complete reverse engineering technique that produces not only the language modular design, but the entire language product line.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse engineering language product lines from existing DSL variants

Méndez-Acuña

Galindo

Combemale

et al. 2017

Journal of Systems and Software

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The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) has become a successful technique to develop complex systems. In this context, an emerging phenomenon is the existence of DSL variants, which are different versions of a DSL adapted to specific purposes but that still share commonalities. In such a case, the challenge for language designers is to reuse, as much as possible, previously defined language constructs to narrow implementation from scratch. To overcome this challenge, recent research in software languages engineering introduced the the notion of language product lines. Similarly to software product lines, language product lines are often built from a set of existing DSL variants.In this article, we propose a reverse-engineering technique to ease-off such a development scenario. Our approach receives a set of DSL variants which are used to automatically recover a language modular design and to synthesize the corresponding variability models. The validation is performed in a project involving industrial partners that required three different variants of a DSL for finite state machines. This validation shows that our approach is able to correctly identify commonalities and variability.

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Reverse-Engineering Reusable Language Modules from Legacy Domain-Specific Languages

Cited by 6 publications

References 26 publications

Feature location benchmark for extractive software product line adoption research using realistic and synthetic Eclipse variants

Feature location benchmark for extractive software product line adoption research using realistic and synthetic Eclipse variants

Puzzle: A Tool for Analyzing and Extracting Specification Clones in DSLs

Reverse engineering language product lines from existing DSL variants

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