Title
Automatic model generation from documentation for Java API functions.
Abstract
Modern software systems are becoming increasingly complex, relying on a lot of third-party library support. Library behaviors are hence an integral part of software behaviors. Analyzing them is as important as analyzing the software itself. However, analyzing libraries is highly challenging due to the lack of source code, implementation in different languages, and complex optimizations. We observe that many Java library functions provide excellent documentation, which concisely describes the functionalities of the functions. We develop a novel technique that can construct models for Java API functions by analyzing the documentation. These models are simpler implementations in Java compared to the original ones and hence easier to analyze. More importantly, they provide the same functionalities as the original functions. Our technique successfully models 326 functions from 14 widely used Java classes. We also use these models in static taint analysis on Android apps and dynamic slicing for Java programs, demonstrating the effectiveness and efficiency of our models.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2884781.2884881
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
documentation analysis,environment modeling,natural language processing,auto-testing
Programming language,Software engineering,Computer science,Java annotation,Real time Java,Java API for XML-based RPC,Application programming interface,Generics in Java,Java Modeling Language,Java applet,Java
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
978-1-5090-2071-3
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.57
23
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Juan Zhai1678.56
Jianjun Huang2241.77
Shiqing Ma31036.20
Xiangyu Zhang42857151.00
Lin Tan5164867.22
Zhao Jianhua632744.13
Qin Feng7100267.52