Title
Multi-granular conflict and dependency analysis in software engineering based on graph transformation.
Abstract
Conflict and dependency analysis (CDA) of graph transformation has been shown to be a versatile foundation for understanding interactions in many software engineering domains, including software analysis and design, model-driven engineering, and testing. In this paper, we propose a novel static CDA technique that is multi-granular in the sense that it can detect all conflicts and dependencies on multiple granularity levels. Specifically, we provide an efficient algorithm suite for computing binary, coarse-grained, and fine-grained conflicts and dependencies: Binary granularity indicates the presence or absence of conflicts and dependencies, coarse granularity focuses on root causes for conflicts and dependencies, and fine granularity shows each conflict and dependency in full detail. Doing so, we can address specific performance and usability requirements that we identified in a literature survey of CDA usage scenarios. In an experimental evaluation, our algorithm suite computes conflicts and dependencies rapidly. Finally, we present a user study, in which the participants found our coarse-grained results more understandable than the fine-grained ones reported in a state-of-the-art tool. Our overall contribution is twofold: (i) we significantly speed up the computation of fine-grained and binary CDA results and, (ii) complement them with coarse-grained ones, which offer usability benefits for numerous use cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3180155.3180258
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
automated static analysis
Use case,Task analysis,Software engineering,Computer science,Software analysis pattern,Model-driven architecture,Usability,Graph rewriting,Granularity,Program comprehension
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5638-1
3
0.38
References 
Authors
35
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Leen Lambers139731.22
Daniel Strüber211621.50
Gabriele Taentzer32667196.98
Kristopher Born472.11
Jevgenij Huebert530.38