Glauco de Figueiredo Carneiro

Identifying Code Smells with Multiple Concern Views

Code smells are anomalies often caused by the way concerns are realized in the source code. Their identification might depend on properties governing the structure of individual concerns and their inter-dependencies in the system implementation. Although code visualization tools are increasingly applied to support anomaly detection, they are mostly limited to represent modular structures, such as methods, classes and packages. This paper presents a multiple views approach that enriches four categories of code views with concern properties, namely: (i) concern’s package-class method structure, (ii) concern’s inheritance-wise structure, (iii)concern dependency, and (iv) concern dependency weight. An exploratory study was conducted to assess the extent to which visual views support code smell detection. Developers identified a set of well-known code smells on five versions of an open source system. Two important results came out of this study. First, the concern-driven views provided useful support to identify God Class and Divergent Change smells. Second, strategies for smell detection supported by the multiple concern views were uncovered.

Combining software visualization paradigms to support software comprehension activities

Modern IDEs offer built-in support for developing plug-ins. More recently, we have seen a growing number of plug-ins that offer non-conventional software visualization interfaces. They usually aim to help programmers to understand unfamiliar source code by representing it in visual structures such as trees, scatter-plots or graphs. This poster presents a plug-in built to integrate and combine several software visualization paradigms for supporting customized software comprehension activities.

SourceMiner: Towards an Extensible Multi-perspective Software Visualization Environment

In spite of the available resources provided by modern IDEs, program understanding remains as a difficult task in software engineering. This paper presents a software visualization environment named SourceMiner. Implemented as an Eclipse plug-in to enhance software comprehension activities, SourceMiner is an extensible, interactive and coordinated multi-perspective environment. This paper describes the principles behind the design of SourceMiner, and discusses how it has been used to support software comprehension activities such as the identification of code smells and the characterization of object-oriented software systems.

Evaluating the usefulness of software visualization in supporting software comprehension activities

Modern IDEs offer built-in support for developing plug-ins. More recently, we have seen a growing number of plug-ins that offer non-conventional software visualization interfaces. They usually aim to help programmers to understand unfamiliar source code by representing it in visual structures such as trees, scatter-plots or graphs. Although very attractive visually, we need to know more about the effectiveness of these interfaces in conveying information to software engineers. In this paper, we propose an infrastructure to empirically evaluate how useful are non-conventional visual paradigms in supporting software comprehension activities. The results for the first pilot study indicated that our experimental environment was consistent and could move to a full scale controlled experiment.

A Multiple View Interactive Environment to Support MATLAB and GNU/Octave Program Comprehension

Program comprehension plays an important role in Software Engineering. In fact, many of the software lifecycle activities depend on program comprehension. Despite the importance of MATLAB and Octave programing languages in the Engineering and Statistical communities, little attention has been paid to the conception, implementation and characterization of tools and techniques for the comprehension of programs written in these languages. Considering this scenario, this paper presents a Multiple View Interactive Environment (MVIE) called Oct Miner that supports the comprehension of programs developed in the aforementioned languages. Oct Miner provides a set of coordinated visual metaphors that can be adjusted in accordance with the comprehension goals. An example is presented to illustrate the main functionalities of Oct Miner in a real scenario of program comprehension.

Towards the Development of a Framework for Multiple View Interactive Environments

Multiple views interactive environments (MVIEs) have been used to visually analyze different types of data. These environments provide visual mechanisms based on interaction resources to support users to analyze and understand data. However, building MVIEs is challenging, as it involves the use of sophisticated visual and coordination mechanisms. This paper discusses the motivation, technical approach and results of the use of a developing framework for MVIEs. The goal is to provide support for the development of resources and functionalities to MVIEs. We illustrate the frameworks usage through a case study. The first part of the case study aimed at illustrating to which extent the framework supports the development of MVIEs. The second part of the case study aimed at explaining to which extent the framework supports the development and inclusion of new resources to a MVIE. These two parts show examples and evidences of how the framework supports the development of MVIEs.

Scaffolding MATLAB and Octave Software Comprehension Through Visualization.

Multiple view interactive environments (MVIEs) provide visual resources to support the comprehension of a specific domain dataset. For any domain, different views can be selected and configured in a real time fashion to be better adjusted to the user needs. This paper focuses on the use of a MVIE called OctMiner to support the comprehension of MATLAB and GNU/Octave programs. The authors conducted a case study to characterize the use of OctMiner in the context of comprehension activities. Results provide preliminary evidence of the effectiveness of OctMiner to support the comprehension of programs written in

Code Smells Incidence: Does It Depend on the Application Domain?

Background: Code smells are considered detrimental to maintainability. To plan QA preventive initiatives (e.g. refactoring actions) it is important to know if the application domain is likely to affect the incidence of those problems. Objective: The main goal of this paper is to check if the application domain has a statistically significant impact on the incidence of code smells. Methods: We conducted a quasi-experiment using 118 Java applications, classified into 6 application domains, and including 7 types of code smells. To test the formulated hypotheses, we used the Kruskal-Wallis and ANOVA tests. Results: Our results show that the incidence of most code smells does not depend on the application domain, with the exception of Duplicated Code smell, where it was found that its incidence in the domain Home & Education is superior to the others. Limitations: This study was based on medium sized open source applications written in Java. Therefore, its external validity will be questionable outside this scope. Conclusions: For 6 out of 7 code smell types, our results corroborate previous studies where no difference could be found on code smells incidence across applications. However, statistically significant differences were found for the Duplicated Code (aka Clone) smell. This result confirmed the claim produced by Martin Fowler almost 20 years ago that software clones may be induced by the application domain.

Investigating Reputation in Collaborative Software Maintenance: A Study Based on Systematic Mapping

[Background] Reputation systems have attracted the attention of researchers when it comes to collaborative systems. In the context of collaborative software maintenance, systems of this type are employed to facilitate the collection, aggregation and distribution of reputation information about a participant. GiveMe Infra is an infrastructure that supports collaborative software maintenance performed both by co-located and geographically distributed teams. In this last case, reputation is one of the factors that influence collaboration. Despite this recognized relevance, to the best of our knowledge, there is a shortage of tools providing reputation functionalities in the context of collaborative software maintenance. [Objective] However, GiveMe Infra needs to identify and correlate metrics, measures, criteria and factors (called parameters) that are used in defining the value of reputation of an entity. These parameters, used to determine the degree of reputation, can provide evidence of parameters to be used in the context of software maintenance and evolution. [Method] In order to achieve this goal, a systematic mapping was performed. Both the established protocol and the process adopted during the mapping are shown in this article. The parameters identified, as well as how to apply them in the context of software maintenance are demonstrated through an analysis scenario. [Results] Our goal has been achieved since the systematic mapping allowed the identification of the parameters used in defining reputation and even parameters that would not allow a correlation with the context of collaborative software maintenance. The contribution of this research is threefold, in its investigation carried out, the list of identified parameters and also the application in the collaborative software maintenance context.

Cloud Computing Adoption, Cost-benefit Relationship and Strategies for Selecting Providers: A Systematic Review

Context: Cloud computing has been one of the most promising computing paradigms in industry to provide a customizable and resourceful platform to deploy software. There are a number of competing providers and available services that allows organizations to access computing services without owning the corresponding infrastructure. Goal: Identify the main characteristics of opportunities to migrate to the cloud, the respective challenges and difficulties as well as factors that affect the cost-benefit relationship of such adoption. Method: This paper presents a systematic literature review to compare reported strategies of organizations to migrate and adopt cloud computing and their perception of the cost-benefit of this adoption. Results: The overall data collected from these studies depicts that a significant part of the companies perceived inclination towards for the innovation adoption process influenced by technological, organizational and environmental contexts. Conclusion: Due to the variety of strategies, approaches and tools reported in the primary studies, it is expected that the results in this systematic literature review would help in establishing knowledge on how the companies should adopt and migrate to the cloud, how the cost-benefit relationship can be evaluated as well as providers can be selected. These findings can be a useful reference to develop guidelines for an effective use of cloud computing.