Software evolution understanding: Automatic extraction of software identifiers map for object-oriented software systems

Software Evolution and Maintenance — Software
Evolution Understanding — Juana Approach
“Automatic Extraction of Software Identifiers Map for Object-Oriented
Software Systems”
Ra'Fat Al-Msie'deen
Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of IT, Mutah University, Mutah 61710, Karak, Jordan
E-mail address: rafatalmsiedeen@mutah.edu.jo
https://rafat66.github.io/Al-Msie-Deen/

➢ To cite this version:
R. Al-Msie’deen and A. H. Blasi, “Software evolution understanding:
Automatic extraction of software identifiers map for object-oriented
software systems,” Journal of Communications Software and Systems,
vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 20–28, 2021. [Online]. Available:
https://jcoms.fesb.unist.hr/10.24138/jcomss.v17i1.1093/

Abstract
Software companies usually develop a set of product variants within the
same family that share certain functions and differ in others. Variations
across software variants occur to meet different customer requirements.
Thus, software product variants evolve overtime to cope with new
requirements. A software engineer who deals with this family may find it
difficult to understand the evolution scenarios that have taken place over
time. In addition, software identifier names are important resources to
understand the evolution scenarios in this family.
This paper introduces an automatic approach called Juana’s approach to
detect the evolution scenario across two product variants at the source
code level and identifies the common and unique software identifier names
across software variants source code. Juana’s approach refers to common
and unique identifier names as a software identifiers map and computes it
by comparing software variants to each other. Juana considers all software
identifier names such as package, class, attribute, and method.
The novelty of this approach is that it exploits common and unique
identifier names across the source code of software variants, to understand
the evolution scenarios across software family in an efficient way. For
validity, Juana was applied on ArgoUML and Mobile Media software
variants. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the
performance of the approach as all evolution scenarios were correctly
detected via a software identifiers map.

Index Terms
✓Software Engineering
✓Software Evolution
✓Software Identifiers Map
✓Formal Concept Analysis
✓Software Product Variant

Introduction
• Juana’s approach identifies the common and
unique software identifier names between two
Object-Oriented (OO) software variants.
• The common software identifiers are present in
two software variants.
• Furthermore, the unique software identifiers
have presented in one software variant, while
absent in another one.
• Juana computes common and unique software
identifier names by comparing software variants
to each other.
• However, the final result of Juana is the software
identifiers map, which is a visual presentation of
software variant identifier names, presented the
common and unique identifier names between
two product variants.
Juana

Introduction …
• The novelty of Juana is that it exploits all software identifier names of
product variants to identify the common and unique identifier names
across those variants.
• Juana separates the identifiers of two product variants into two subsets,
the common identifiers set, and the unique identifiers set.
• Indeed, common identifier names appear in all variants, while the unique
identifier names appear in one variant but not all variants.
• Manual reverse engineering of common and unique identifier names for
software product variants is a tedious process, time consuming, and
needs large efforts. Supporting this process would be of great aid.

The software
identifiers map
extraction process

Product variant A
Extracting the software identifiers
1
The software identifiers file A The software identifiers file B
Identifying the common and unique identifier names
2
The common identifier names The unique identifier names
Product variant B
Inputs
Software identifiers map
Software developers
Output
Common
Unique
Unique
&

The common and
unique identifiers of
two product variants

Product A
Product B
Legend
The common identifier names
The unique Identifier names

Software evolution understanding: Automatic extraction of software identifiers map for object-oriented software systems

The Software
Identifiers Map
Extraction Process

The Software Identifiers Map Extraction Process
A. Extracting the Software Identifiers
B. Identifying the Common and Unique Identifier Names

Case studies
• To validate the proposed approach, experiments ran on two real case
studies: the mobile media [22] and ArgoUML [23].
• Mobile media software is a Java-based open-source application that
manipulates media on mobile devices.
• ArgoUML is a Java-based open-source software. ArgoUML tool
includes support for all standard UML diagrams.

Conclusion
• This paper focused on detecting common and
unique software identifier names of software
product variants realized via code cloning.
• Juana’s approach aimed to find those identifier
names that are present in one variant of the
software and absent in another.
• The software family is usually well documented
but detecting the common and unique identifier
names in a given software variant still a
challenging task and imprecise in many cases.
• In this paper, Juana’s approach was based on
FCA to identify the common and unique
identifiers from the OO source code of two
software product variants.
• In fact, developers can use this approach to
understand the changes that have occurred
during program evolution.
Juana

Conclusion …
• The novelty of Juana is the exploiting of software identifier names to
understand the software evolution scenarios across the product
family.
• The proposed approach was applied to three case studies, and the
results proved the validity and accuracy in identifying the changes
that occurred during program evolution by comparing the result of
Juana with available documents for each case study.

Future Work
• For future work, Juana’s approach will be
extended by comparing more than two
software variants to identify common and
unique software identifier names.
• Also, Juana’s approach plans to apply the
tag cloud visualization technique [32 – 34,
47] on common and unique identifier
name blocks to present the most frequent
words in those blocks to software
engineers.

• http://code.google.com/p/erca/
• https://sdqweb.ipd.kit.edu/wiki/SPLevo/Case_Studies/ArgoUML-SPL
• http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~tizzei/mobilemedia/
• https://sites.google.com/site/ralmsideen/tools
• https://www.ifi.uzh.ch/en/seal/research/tools/changeDistiller.html
❖ All references:
[1] R. Al-Msie’deen and Anas H. Blasi, “The impact of the object-oriented software
evolution on software metrics: The iris approach,” Indian Journal of Science and
Technology, vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 1–8, 2018, DOI: 10.17485/ijst/2018/v11i8/121148.
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-
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[48]

Juana Approach: Software Evolution and Maintenance — Software
Evolution Understanding

Software evolution understanding: Automatic extraction of software identifiers map for object-oriented software systems

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