Towards a language-independent approach for reverse-engineering of software product lines

Ziadi, Tewfik; Henard, Christopher; Papadakis, Mike; Ziane, Mikal; Traon, Yves Le

doi:10.1145/2554850.2554874

Cited by 32 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In the past, several research projects have worked on the problem of specification mining [60,5,20,53]. Dynamic specification mining approaches, which are the context of this paper, work by executing the code and mining execution traces or logs.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive semi-automated specification mining for debugging: An experience report

Mashhadi

Siddiqui

Hemmati

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Specification mining techniques are typically used to extract the specification of a software in the absence of (up-to-date) specification documents. This is useful for program comprehension, testing, and anomaly detection. However, specification mining can also potentially be used for debugging, where a faulty behavior is abstracted to give developers a context about the bug and help them locating it. Objective: In this project, we investigate this idea in an industrial setting. We propose a very basic semi-automated specification mining approach for debugging and apply that on real reported issues from an AutoPilot software system from our industry partner, MicroPilot Inc. The objective is to assess the feasibility and usefulness of the approach in a real-world setting. Method: The approach is developed as a prototype tool, working on C code, which accept a set of relevant state fields and functions, per issue, and generates an extended finite state machine that represents the faulty behavior, abstracted with respect to the relevant context (the selected fields and functions). Results:We qualitatively evaluate the approach by a set of interviews (including observational studies) with the company's developers on their real-world reported bugs. The results show that a) our approach is feasible, b) it can be automated to some extent, and c) brings advantages over only using their code-level debugging tools. We also compared this approach with traditional fully automated state-merging algorithms and reported several issues when applying those techniques on a real-world debugging context. Conclusion: The main conclusion of this study is that the idea of an "interactive" specification mining rather than a fully automated mining tool is NOT impractical and indeed is useful for the debugging use case.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive semi-automated specification mining for debugging: An experience report

Mashhadi

Siddiqui

Hemmati

et al. 2019

Information and Software Technology

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“…Source code: We reproduced several case studies of feature identification [5] presented in previous works dealing with variants of source code in Java and C [14]. We used an extended version of the Java BUT4Reuse adapter to analyze several families of Android apps.…”

Section: Validation Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bottom-Up Technologies for Reuse: Automated Extractive Adoption of Software Product Lines

Martínez¹,

Ziadi²,

Bissyandé

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C)

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Abstract-Adopting Software Product Line (SPL) engineering principles demands a high up-front investment. Bottom-Up Technologies for Reuse (BUT4Reuse) is a generic and extensible tool aimed to leverage existing similar software products in order to help in extractive SPL adoption. The envisioned users are 1) SPL adopters and 2) Integrators of techniques and algorithms to provide automation in SPL adoption activities. We present the methodology it implies for both types of users and we present the validation studies that were already conducted. BUT4Reuse tool and source code are publicly available under the EPL license.

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“…However, depending on the nature of the variants, this can concern code fragments in the case of source code [2,11,23,34], model fragments in the context of models [12,20] or software components in software architectures [1,14]. Therefore, existing techniques are composed of the following two phases: 1) Abstraction, where the different product variants are abstracted and represented as implementation elements; 2) Location, where algorithms analyse and compare the different product variants to create groups of implementation elements.…”

Section: Feature Locationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feature Location Benchmark for Software Families Using Eclipse Community Releases

Martínez¹,

Ziadi²,

Papadakis³

et al. 2016

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. It is common belief that high impact research in software reuse requires assessment in realistic, non-trivial, comparable, and reproducible settings. However, real 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 is a research field that is becoming more mature with a high proliferation of techniques. We present EFLBench, a benchmark and a framework to provide a common ground for this field. EFLBench leverages the efforts made by the Eclipse Community which provides real feature-based family artefacts and their implementations. Eclipse is an active and non-trivial project and thus, it establishes an unbiased ground truth. EFLBench is publicly available and supports all tasks for feature location techniques integration, benchmark construction and benchmark usage. We demonstrate its usage and its simplicity and reproducibility by comparing four techniques.

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Towards a language-independent approach for reverse-engineering of software product lines

Cited by 32 publications

References 23 publications

Interactive semi-automated specification mining for debugging: An experience report

Interactive semi-automated specification mining for debugging: An experience report

Bottom-Up Technologies for Reuse: Automated Extractive Adoption of Software Product Lines

Feature Location Benchmark for Software Families Using Eclipse Community Releases

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