SOFAS: A Lightweight Architecture for Software Analysis as a Service

Abstract

Access to data stored in software repositories by systems such as version control, bug and issue tracking, or mailing lists is essential for assessing the quality of a software system. A myriad of analyses exploiting that data have been proposed throughout the years: source code analysis, code duplication analysis, co-change analysis, bug prediction, or detection of bug fixing patterns. However, easy and straight forward synergies between these analyses rarely exist. To tackle this problem we have developed SOFAS, a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform to enable a seamless interoperation of such analyses. In particular, software analyses are offered as RESTful web services that can be accessed and composed over the Internet. SOFAS services are accessible through a software analysis catalog where any project stakeholder can, depending on the needs or interests, pick specific analyses, combine them, let them run remotely and then fetch the final results. That way, software developers, testers, architects, or quality assurance experts are given access to quality analysis services. They are shielded from many peculiarities of tool installations and configurations, but SOFAS offers them sophisticated and easy-to-use analyses. This paper describes in detail our SOFAS architecture, its considerations and implementation aspects, and the current set of implemented and offered RESTful analysis services. Abstract-Access to data stored in software repositories by systems such as version control, bug and issue tracking, or mailing lists is essential for assessing the quality of a software system. A myriad of analyses exploiting that data have been proposed throughout the years: source code analysis, code duplication analysis, co-change analysis, bug prediction, or detection of bug fixing patterns. However, easy and straight forward synergies between these analyses rarely exist. To tackle this problem we have developed SOFAS , a distributed and collaborative software analysis platform to enable a seamless interoperation of such analyses. In particular, software analyses are offered as RESTful web services that can be accessed and composed over the Internet. SOFAS services are accessible through a software analysis catalog where any project stakeholder can, depending on the needs or interests, pick specific analyses, combine them, let them run remotely and then fetch the final results. That way, software developers, testers, architects, or quality assurance experts are given access to quality analysis services. They are shielded from many peculiarities of tool installations and configurations, but SOFAS offers them sophisticated and easy-to-use analyses. This paper describes in detail our SOFAS architecture, its considerations and implementation aspects, and the current set of implemented and offered RESTful analysis services.

Rapid Multi-Purpose, Multi-Commit Code Analysis

“…A recent revision of AspectJ contains 448 808 lines of code (not counting comments and blank lines) in 6 331 files and the AspectJ git repository contains 7 686 commits from close to 14 years of development. We first used SOFAS [4], a service-oriented software analysis framework, and inFusion [8], a commercial stand-alone tool, to analyze a recent revision of AspectJ. We then used LISA to analyze that same revision, as well as the most recent 10 revisions, the most recent 100 and the most recent 1000-7000 revisions (in increments of 1000) and finally all revisions.…”

SEON: a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution and its applications

“…To overcome these challenges, we have devised Sofas 11 (SOFtware Analysis Services), which we presented in [20]. Sofas allows for a simple yet effective provisioning and use of software analyses based upon the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST, as introduced by Fielding in [15]) around resources on the Web.…”

“…We refrain from discussing publications that are only related to the approaches presented in Section 5, but not particularly to the Semantic Web and ontologies. Related work in the context of software analysis services was already given in [20], whereas research in the area of program comprehension and developer support has been discussed extensively in [59].…”

How to ”Make a Bridge to the New Town” Using OntoAccess

“…Based on these premises, we introduced the concept of "Software Analysis as a Service" [16]: getting easy access to different analyses from various tools and providers using Web services. We implemented that concept into a lightweight and flexible platform called Sofas (SOFtware Analysis Services) [17].…”

“…The contribution of this paper is a case study on how we successfully used OntoAccess to advance our Eclipse-based software evolution analysis framework Evolizer [13] to Sofas [17], a service-oriented, distributed, and collaborative software analysis platform. We describe use cases where existing RDBto-RDF approaches are insufficient and an approach such as OntoAccess is needed.…”