Refactoring Fat Interfaces Using a Genetic Algorithm

Recent studies have shown that the violation of the Interface Segregation Principle (ISP) is critical for maintaining and evolving software systems. Fat interfaces (i.e., interfaces violating the ISP) change more frequently and degrade the quality of the components coupled to them. According to the ISP the interfaces’ design should force no...

A Genetic Algorithm to Find the Adequate Granularity for Service Interfaces

The relevance of the service interfaces’ granularity and its architectural impact have been widely investigated in literature. Existing studies show that the granularity of a service interface, in terms of exposed operations, should reflect their clients’ usage. This idea has been formalized in the Consumer-Driven Contracts pattern (CDC)....

Towards a weighted voting system for Q&A sites

Version: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2013, IEEE Computer Society. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2013.49 Q&A sites have become popular to share and look for valuable knowledge. Users can easily and quickly access high quality answers to common questions. The...

Analyzing the Change-Proneness of Service-Oriented Systems from an Industrial Perspective

Antipatterns and code smells have been widely proved to affect the change-proneness of software components. However, there is a lack of studies that propose indicators of changes for service-oriented systems. Like any other software systems, such systems evolve to address functional and non functional requirements. In this research, we...

Extracting Dynamic Dependencies between Web Services Using Vector Clocks

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables organizations to react to requirement changes in an agile manner and to foster the reuse of existing services. However, the dynamic nature of service oriented systems and their agility bear the challenge of properly understanding such systems. In particular, understanding the dependencies among...

An Approach for Search Based Testing of Null Pointer Exceptions

Uncaught exceptions, and in particular null pointer exceptions (NPEs), constitute a major cause of crashes for software systems. Although tools for the static identification of potential NPEs exist, there is need for proper approaches able to identify system execution scenarios causing NPEs. This paper proposes a search-based test data...

Using Source Code Metrics to Predict Change-Prone Java Interfaces

Recent empirical studies have investigated the use of source code metrics to predict the change- and defect-proneness of source code files and classes. While results showed strong correlations and good predictive power of these metrics, they do not distinguish between interface, abstract or concrete classes. In particular, interfaces declare...