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The Known Unknowns: Discovering Trade-Offs Between Heterogeneous Code Changes

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Book cover Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS 2021)

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Abstract

Software projects must adhere to a variety of non-functional requirements, also known as software qualities. Automated evaluation with respect to such requirements can be conducted thanks to a wide array of available tools. Each tool usually focuses on a specific quality, since heterogeneous analyses are needed for each non-functional requirement. Apart from an overall index expressing the project’s performance in terms of the software quality they specialize on, many tools recommend code changes that are expected to improve the aforementioned index. Thus, a development team that cares for more than one non-functional requirement is facing the problem of unknown trade-offs; besides improving the quality on which the tool that generated each suggestion focuses, how would this code change, if implemented, affect the rest of the non-functional requirements? We present a framework for dealing with this problem. We pick energy efficiency, technical debt and software security as our qualities of interest, and use three respective tools for the analysis of several open-source projects with regard to these qualities. We develop an extensible empirical model, based on fuzzy sets, for the characterization of each suggestion’s trade-offs. Finally, we present an intuitive visualization of said trade-offs, and suggest a method of utilizing them towards reliable decision-making.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.iso.org/standard/35733.html.

  2. 2.

    https://reactjs.org/.

  3. 3.

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  6. 6.

    Since this is a prototype, we do not intend to delve into further details. We use the figures in this section as assistants to the reader’s intuition.

  7. 7.

    Preference declaration is trivial given an MCDM algorithm. The reader may study [30] for the particular case that we implemented.

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Acknowledgments

This work has received funding by the EU H2020 research and innovation programme EXA2PRO under grant agreement No. 801015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of ECE, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Christos P. Lamprakos, Charalampos Marantos, Lazaros Papadopoulos & Dimitrios Soudris

Authors
  1. Christos P. Lamprakos
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  2. Charalampos Marantos
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  3. Lazaros Papadopoulos
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  4. Dimitrios Soudris
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christos P. Lamprakos .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Alex Orailoglu

  2. Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Matthias Jung

  3. Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany

    Marc Reichenbach

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Lamprakos, C.P., Marantos, C., Papadopoulos, L., Soudris, D. (2022). The Known Unknowns: Discovering Trade-Offs Between Heterogeneous Code Changes. In: Orailoglu, A., Jung, M., Reichenbach, M. (eds) Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation. SAMOS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13227. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04580-6_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04580-6_23

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