SATToSE is the Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques and Tools for Software Evolution. Its previous editions have happened in Waulsort (Belgium, 2008), Côte d'Opale (France, 2009), Montpellier (France, 2010), Koblenz (Germany, 2011, 2012), Bern (Switzerland, 2013), and L'Aquila (Italy, 2014). Its 8th edition took place in Mons, Belgium from the 6th till the 8th of July, 2015. Each edition of SATToSE witnesses presentations on software visualisation techniques, tools for coevolving various software artefacts, their consistency management, runtime adaptability and context-awareness, as well as empirical results about software evolution. The goal of SATToSE is to gather both undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their research, exchange ideas, improve their communication skills, attend and contribute technology showdown and hackathons. The highlights of the programme included two invited talks (given by Anita Sarma and Martin Pinzger), two interactive tutorials (by Gregorio Robles and Massimiliano Di Penta), and hackathon (by Bogdan Vasilescu). The detailed programme, as well as the pre-proceedings drafts can be found on our website: http://sattose.org/2015.
Each pre-proceedings submission was reviewed by at least three different peers. All submissions with a conflict of interest with one of the editors (co-authored by them or their colleagues) were handled by the other PC chair. We would like to express our gratitude to the program committee (listed in lexicographic order) who provided the reviews.
The call for post-proceedings contributions was communicated to all participants after the event. Only some decided to pursue the finalisation of their contribution for the post-proceedings where they might have solicited more coauthors, changed the title, and included more results. As a result, we have received 6 submissions of the extended versions of pre-proceedings abstracts.
Each submitted report has been reviewed by at least three different peers. All submissions with a conflict of interest with one of the editors (co-authored by them or their colleagues) were handled by the other editor. The emphasis was put on clear problem definitions and descriptions of advanced aspects of the techniques contemplated in the solution, as opposed to the finality of the obtained results. Thus, most submissions are intermediate reports on ongoing work or summaries of previously developed tools and papers.
General Chair: Tom Mens (University of Mons, Belgium) Program Chair: Anya Helene Bagge (University of Bergen, Norway) Hackathon Chair: Bogdan Vasilescu (UC Davis, USA) Local Organization Chair: Mathieu Goeminne (University of Mons, Belgium) Steering Committee Chair: Ralf Lämmel (Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany) Steering Committee:
Coen De Roever (Free University Brussels, Belguim) Davide Di Ruscio (University of L’Aquila, Italy) Michael W. Godfrey (University of Waterloo, Canada) Oscar Nierstrasz (University of Bern, Switzerland) Vadim Zaytsev (Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Tom Mens (University of Mons, Belgium) Marianne Huchard (Université Montpellier 2, France)
Anthony Cleve (University of Namur, Belgium) Post-proceedings Editors:
Anya Helene Bagge (University of Bergen, Norway) Tom Mens (University of Mons, Belgium)
Haidar Osman (University of Bern, Switzerland)
1. Developer Oriented and Quality Assurance Based Simulation of Software Processes Software process planning involves the consideration of process based factors, e.g., development strategies, but also social factors, e.g., collaboration of developers. To facilitate project managers in decision making during the project, we develop an agent-based simulation tool which allows them to test different alternative future scenarios. For this, it is indispensable to understand software evolution and its influences. We cover different aspects of software evolution with models tailored towards specific questions. For the investigation of system growth, developer networks and file dependency graphs, we performed two case studies of open source projects. This way, we infer parameters close to reality and are able to compare empirical with simulated results. 2. Weighted Multi-Factor Multi-Layer Identification of Potential Causes for Events of Interest in Software Repositories Change labelling is a fundamental challenge in software evolution. Certain kinds of changes can be labeled based on directly measurable characteristics. Labels for other kinds of changes, such as changes causing subsequent fixes, need to be estimated retrospectively. In this article we present a weightbased approach for identifying potential causes for events of interest based on a cause-fix graph supporting multiple factors, such as causing a fix or a refactoring, and multiple layers reflecting different levels of granularity, such as project, file, class, method. We outline different strategies that can be employed to refine the weights distribution across the different layers in order to obtain more specific labelling at finer levels of granularity. 3. On the Interaction of Relational Database Access Technologies in Open Source Java Projects This article presents an empirical study of how the use of relational database access technologies in open source Java projects evolves over time. Our observations may be useful to project managers to make more informed decisions on which technologies to introduce into an existing project and when. We selected 2,457 Java projects on GitHub using the low-level JDBC technology and higher-level object relational mappings such as Hibernate XML configuration files and JPA annotations. At a coarse-grained level, we analysed the probability of introducing such technologies over time, as well as the likelihood that multiple technologies co-occur within the same project. At a fine-grained level, we analysed to which extent these different technologies are used within the same set of project files. We also explored how the introduction of a new database technology in a Java project impacts the use of existing ones. We observed that, contrary to what could have been expected, object-relational mapping technologies do not tend to replace existing ones but rather complement them.
newpage 4. Predicting Software Defectiveness through Network Analysis
We used a complex network approach to study the evolution of a large software system, Eclipse, with the aim of statistically characterizing software defectiveness along the time. We studied the software networks associated to several releases of the system, focusing our attention specifically on their community structure, modularity and clustering coefficient. We found that the maximum average defect density is related, directly or indirectly, to two different metrics: the number of detected communities inside a software network and the clustering coefficient. These two relationships both follow a power-law distribution which leads to a linear correlation between clustering coeffcient and number of communities. These results can be useful to make predictions about the evolution of software systems, especially with respect to their defectiveness. 5. Interactive User-Oriented Views for Better Understanding Software Systems Understanding software artefacts is a crucial task for people who want to participate in any software development process. However, because of the large amount of detailed and scattered information in software artefacts, understanding them is usually time-consuming and vulnerable to human errors and subjectivities. A system that aids practitioners to investigate understanding about software artefacts could reduce the vulnerabilities and speed up software development/maintenance process. Our research focuses on building a comprehensive view of software system in order for developers to achieve the two goals: (i) to save the time spending on searching and navigating on source code; and (ii) to gain better understanding about software artefacts regarding to domain-specific tasks. To achieve these goals, we propose an empirical approach in which the visualisation and the generation of high-level design and architectural views from source code and design documentations have been played central roles. The research is ongoing and could potentially be extended to different software artefacts (such as requirements, use-cases, test-cases, revision logs). 6. BibSLEIGH: Bibliography of Software (Language) Engineering in Generated Hypertext The body of research contributions is vast and full of papers. Existing projects help us navigate through it and relate authors to papers and papers to venues. In this paper we list features missing from those projects and propose a solution in the form of BibSLEIGH, a work in progress on facilitated browsing of scientific knowledge objects. Through leveraging domain focus, by actively employing automated data collection and scraping tools, and with automated annotating of the corpus, we are able to gain and provide insights into scientific communities and topics, as well as surface potential interdisciplinary opportunities.