Presented at 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), IEEE, Limerick, Ireland, October, 2011

1. Can we predict
dependencies using
domain information?
Amir Aryani Fabrizio Perin Mircea Lungu Abdun Mahmood Oscar Nierstrasz
RMIT University, Australia
University of Bern, Switzerland
Presented at 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE),
IEEE, Limerick, Ireland, October, 2011

2. Outline
• A method for finding architectural dependencies
• without looking at the source code,
• without looking at design documents.
• A case study on ADempiere.
• Research collaboration opportunities.

3. 915,250
Management Information Systems (MIS)
$1.8 trillion
Development Cost of MIS systems in USA, Capers Jones, Applied Software Measurement: Global analysis of
productivity and quality, Third Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2008

4. Motivation example: It is required to remove
Business Partner tab from this screen.
Fact: There are 346 other screens in this software

5. Common problems in
software maintenance
• Systems with legacy code, e.g., COBOL
• Hybrid systems, e.g., Python and Java
• Missing design documents
• Inaccessible maintenance history

6. Motivations
• Domain-based approach works
• without access to source code,
• without access to design documents.
• It might be cost efficient.
• You can collaborate with domain experts.

7. How does it work?
• Domain-based Coupling
• A case study on ADempiere

8. Example of related screens
Domain variables

9. Domain-level relationships
Aryani et al. ICSM 2010
User Interface Component
HAS
Domain
Functions f1 f2 f3
USES
Domain d1 d3
d4
Variables d3
d1 d9
d5

10. Domain-based coupling Aryani et al. ICSM 2010
| UIC1.HAS.USE ∩ UIC2.HAS.USE |
[0..1]
| UIC1.HAS.USE ∪ UIC2.HAS.USE |
UIC 1 f1 f2 UIC 2 f3 f4
d7
d3 d7
HAS.USE d1
d5 d4
d3
HAS.USE
d3 d2
d9 d4 d4
d4 d3
d5
d6
d5 d7 d5
d9
d1 d7 d1 d1
d8
d9 d8 d9
d7 d2

11. Does domain-based
coupling reflect architectural
dependencies?

12. Case Study
• 120,111 times downloaded in 2011
• 3,531 Java Classes
• 2,569,854 lines of code
• Four distinct interfaces
• 347 screens

13. Architectural Dependencies
17,605 Architectural dependencies
Presentation
Layer
14,898 Source code dependencies
Source Code
Layer
20,310 Database dependencies
Data SQL
Layer Application
M. Lungu and M. Lanza, Softwarenaut, CSMR 2006 Dictionary PostgreSQL/
Oracle

14. 64% of architecturally connected
UICs have domain-based coupling.
64%
Recall

15. Precision & Accuracy
Dependencies FNM=18
TPM=31
Predictions
TPi FPM=76
PM = = 30%
TPi + FPi
TPi + TNi
AM = = 73% TNM=223
TPi + FPi + TNi + FNi

16. Improving Precision
Precision
Accuracy Recall

17. Visual Comparison
Domain-based Coupling Graph Dependency Graph

18. What are the related research
opportunities?

19. Future work
• Extending the case study to other systems
• Studying finer-grained components, e.g., Tabs
• Qualitative analysis of false negatives

20. Further research
opportunities
• Can we develop a hybrid method for impact
analysis which uses code analysis and domain
information?
• Can we use domain-based coupling to modularise
the source code to more domain relevant blocks?
• Can domain information assist dynamic analysis?

21. Conclusion
• Domain-based coupling can be used for
approximating dependencies where
• source code analysis is not an option,
• design documents are outdated or
missing.
• In future work, we plan to experiment other
applications of domain-based coupling.