Browsing by Author "Dietrich JB"

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    API evolution and compatibility: A data corpus and tool evaluation
    (AITO, 25/09/2017) Jezek K; Dietrich JB
    The development of software components with independent release cycles is nowadays widely supported by multiple languages and frameworks. A critical feature of any such platform is to safeguard composition by ensuring backward compatibility of substituted components. In recent years, some tooling has been developed to help developers and DevOps engineers to establish whether components are backward compatible by means of static analysis. We investigate the state of the art in this space by benchmarking such tools for Java. For this purpose, we have developed a compact benchmark data set of less than 200KB. Using this dataset, we study possible API changes of Java libraries, and whether the tools investigated can detect them. We find that only a small number of tools suitable to analyse API evolution exist. Those tools are only infrequently maintained by small communities. All tools investigated have some shortcomings in that they fail to detect certain API incompatibilities.
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    XCorpus – An executable corpus of java programs
    (AITO, 25/09/2017) Dietrich JB; Schole H; Sui L; Tempero E
    Empirical studies on code require standardized datasets of significant size extracted from real-world programs in order to be reproducible and generalisable. We argue that there is a need for such data sets that are executable and can therefore be used for experiments using static and dynamic analysis. A harness for such a data set should have high coverage in order to facilitate the construction of comprehensive models of program execution. We present XCorpus, a set of 76 executable, real-world Java programs, including a subset of 70 programs from the Qualitas Corpus. XCorpus uses a harness that is a combination of built-in and generated test cases, resulting in a branch coverage that is significantly better than what is available from DaCapo.