Recommendation Systems for Evolving Software

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Within the software life cycle, the maintenance/evolution phase is viewed as the longest and costliest. Software projects become bigger and more complex with each iteration and documentation is often incomplete. Maintainers and re-engineers need tools that use the sheer amount of data to make timely and relevant suggestions. In the broader field of software engineering, Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering (RSSE) have emerged as such tools. The proposed program aims at uncovering insights about a software project's evolution and using those to propose Recommendation Systems for Evolving Software (RSES).******Changes performed on a software project have different scopes and motivations that can be relevant several versions later. These evolution decisions are not necessarily documented and range from simple renamings to vocabulary shifts or replacements of libraries. Violations of such decisions can eventually result in serious issues: from consistency and comprehension problems to vicious defects. Much like "code smells" is used for symptoms of possible hidden implementation problems, violations of previous evolution decisions qualify as "evolution smells", i.e., symptoms of possible modification problems. This program covers two main axes: (i) techniques that help in uncovering changes and evolution decisions and (ii) proposals for effective RSES based on the investigation of evolution smells. We have been working on the first axis and the generic techniques we (and others) have developed are mature enough to serve as tools for preliminary explorations of evolution smells. The second axis will thus be the immediate focus and will inform the subsequent research efforts for improving techniques concerned with retrieving accurate and meaningful software evolution data.******For this five-year cycle, the objectives are as follows:***1) Collect/study change facts and investigate evolution smells***2) Propose recommendation systems for evolving software***3) Improve techniques for mining evolution decisions***4) Improve approaches for diagram differencing in software evolution.******The first objective will be achieved through a systematic literature review and the study of a corpus of projects that will be used to investigate evolution smells. The second will collect and study tools and publications on RSSEs in order to propose a generic architecture and first iterations of RSES. The last two objectives are about improving techniques that can (i) aggregate change facts in an insightful way or (ii) compute the differences between two versions of a software.******This program investigates technologies that will help engineers in their tasks and thus brings research on software evolution closer to industrial relevance. Strong and motivated students will be trained and will help contribute to significant advances in the discovery and exploitation of new insights about software evolution