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External Dependencies in Software Development

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Quality of Information and Communications Technology (QUATIC 2023)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1871))

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Abstract

Successful software requires constant modifications. To guarantee the continuous proper functioning of the applications, developers need to understand them well, particularly by having an accurate map of the dependencies between the parts they are modifying. However, some of these dependencies are not easily identified. For example, in an Android application, there are dependencies between the Java source code and XML parts, some of which are materialized by a generated “R” Java class. We call such dependencies external because they are introduced by some agent external to the source code. On top of the categorization of dependencies defined in the literature, we define restrictions on the External Dependencies that allow us to verify the source code and identify possible flaws. We created a common approach relying on reusable patterns to search for containers and entities that are part of such dependencies and implemented it in a prototype that we validate on two different projects from GitHub and developed using different frameworks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Google Web Toolkit gwtproject.org.

  2. 2.

    Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition oracle.com/java/technologies/appmodel.html.

  3. 3.

    Open Database Connectivity wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Database_Connectivity.

  4. 4.

    For completion, we include Yu et al. in the table although, as already said, they consider a different type of dependency.

  5. 5.

    They call them “key”.

  6. 6.

    Object Relational Mapping wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping.

  7. 7.

    Remote Method Invocation.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/traccar/traccar-web/tree/legacy.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/redhawk96/UniScore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL, 59000, Lille, France

    Aless Hosry & Nicolas Anquetil

Authors
  1. Aless Hosry
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  2. Nicolas Anquetil
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Correspondence to Aless Hosry .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    José Maria Fernandes

  2. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Guilherme H. Travassos

  3. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Valentina Lenarduzzi

  4. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Xiaozhou Li

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Hosry, A., Anquetil, N. (2023). External Dependencies in Software Development. In: Fernandes, J.M., Travassos, G.H., Lenarduzzi, V., Li, X. (eds) Quality of Information and Communications Technology. QUATIC 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1871. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43703-8_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43702-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43703-8

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