Recommending adaptive changes for framework evolution

• Published in: 2008 ACM/IEEE 30th International Conference on Software Engineering Vol. 2008; no. 24; pp. 481 - 490
• Main Authors: Dagenais, B., Robillard, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-01-2008
• Subjects: adaptive changes; Application software; Computer science; Documentation; framework; historical study; Humans; Inspection; Java; Large-scale systems; Manuals; mining software repositories; origin analysis; partial program analysis; recommendation system; Software engineering; software evolution; Software maintenance
• ISBN: 1424444861; 9781424444861; 1605580791; 9781605580791
• ISSN: 0270-5257; 1558-1225
• DOI: 10.1145/1368088.1368154

In the course of a framework's evolution, changes ranging from a simple refactoring to a complete rearchitecture can break client programs. Finding suitable replacements for framework elements that were accessed by a client program and deleted as part of the framework's evolution can be a challenging task. We present a recommendation system, SemDiff, that suggests adaptations to client programs by analyzing how a framework adapts to its own changes. In a study of the evolution of the Eclipse JDT framework and three client programs, our approach recommended relevant adaptive changes with a high level of precision, and detected non-trivial changes typically undiscovered by current refactoring detection techniques.