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JDiff: A differencing technique and tool for object-oriented programs

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Abstract

During software evolution, information about changes between different versions of a program is useful for a number of software engineering tasks. For example, configuration-management systems can use change information to assess possible conflicts among updates from different users. For another example, in regression testing, knowledge about which parts of a program are unchanged can help in identifying test cases that need not be rerun. For many of these tasks, a purely syntactic differencing may not provide enough information for the task to be performed effectively. This problem is especially relevant in the case of object-oriented software, for which a syntactic change can have subtle and unforeseen effects. In this paper, we present a technique for comparing object-oriented programs that identifies both differences and correspondences between two versions of a program. The technique is based on a representation that handles object-oriented features and, thus, can capture the behavior of object-oriented programs. We also present JDiff, a tool that implements the technique for Java programs. Finally, we present the results of four empirical studies, performed on many versions of two medium-sized subjects, that show the efficiency and effectiveness of the technique when used on real programs.

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Notes

  1. A control-flow graph is a directed graph in which nodes represent statements and edges represent flow of control between statements.

  2. The ECFG is similar to the Java Interclass Graph (JIG)  (Harrold et al., 2001) in terms of the handling of variable and object types and exception constructs. However, the JIG is an inter-procedural representation of a program whereas the ECFG is an intra-procedural representation of a method with summarized information from inter-procedural analyses. In addition, the ECFG also models synchronization constructs.

  3. For efficiency, we exclude class Object from the name, except that for class Object itself.

  4. We use the subscript notation to distinguish variables in recursively called procedures.

  5. http: //www.cc.gatech.edu/aristotle/Tools/jaba.html

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by Tata Consultancy Services, National Science Foundation awards CCR-0306372, CCR-0205422, CCR-9988294, CCR-0209322, and SBE-0123532 to Georgia Tech, and by the State of Georgia to Georgia Tech under the Yamacraw Mission. Kathy Repine implemented a preliminary version of JDiff.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Taweesup Apiwattanapong, Alessandro Orso & Mary Jean Harrold

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  1. Taweesup Apiwattanapong
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  2. Alessandro Orso
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  3. Mary Jean Harrold
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Correspondence to Taweesup Apiwattanapong.

Additional information

An earlier version of this work has been presented at the 19th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2004) (Apiwattanapong et al., 2004).

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Apiwattanapong, T., Orso, A. & Harrold, M.J. JDiff: A differencing technique and tool for object-oriented programs. Autom Softw Eng 14, 3–36 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-006-0002-0

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