Stéphane Ducasse

National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control | INRIA · RMOD -Analyses and Languages Constructs for Object-Oriented Application Evolution Research Team

Refactorings are behavior-preserving code transformations. They are a recommended software development practice and are now a standard feature in modern IDEs. There are however many situations where developers need to perform mere transformations (non-behavior-preserving) or to mix refactorings and transformations. Little work exists on the analysi...

In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, an IT company producing information systems, we are working on migrating Microsoft Access monolithic applications to the web front-end and microservices back-end. Like in most software migrations, developers must learn the target technology, and they will be in charge of the evolution of the m...

Far from the latest innovations in software development, many organizations still rely on old code written in "obsolete" programming languages. Because this source code is old and proven it often contributes significantly to the continuing success of these organizations. Yet to keep the applications relevant and running in an evolving environment,...

In object-oriented languages, method visibility modifiers hold a key role in separating internal methods from the public API. Protected visibility modifiers offer a way to hide methods from external objects while authorizing internal use and overriding in subclasses. While present in main statically-typed languages, visibility modifiers are not as...

In object-oriented programming, classes are the primary abstraction mechanism used by and exposed to developers. Understanding classes is key for the development and evolution of object-oriented applications. The fundamental problem faced by developers is that while classes are intrinsically structured entities, in IDEs they are represented as a bl...

Context Literals are constant values (numbers, strings, etc.) used in the source code. Magic literals are such values used without an explicit explanation of their meaning. Such undocumented values may hinder source-code comprehension, negatively impacting maintenance. Relatively little literature can be found on the subject beyond the usual (and v...

Understanding systematically the modernization literature and grasping the major concepts is challenging and time-consuming. Even more, research evolves, and it does it based on the assumption that many words (such as migration) have a single well-known meaning that we all share. Since these word meanings are rarely explicit, and their usage hetero...

Software applications often depend on external libraries and must be updated when one of those libraries releases a new version. To make this process easier, library developers try to reduce the negative effect of breaking changes by deprecating the API elements before removing them and suggesting replacements to the clients. Modern programming lan...

Testing and debugging language Virtual Machines (VMs) is a laborious task without the proper tooling. This complexity is aggravated when the VM targets multiple architectures. To solve this problem, simulation-based VM generator frameworks allow one to write test cases on the simulation, but those test cases do not ensure the correctness of the gen...

Studies have shown that more than 50% of software maintenance time is spent reading code to understand it. This puts a strong emphasis on the understandability of source code. Class names constitute one of the first pieces of information developers have access to. To assist developers in understanding the logic and regularity of class names, we pr...

With the generalization of mobile devices and Web applications, GUI frameworks evolve at a fast pace: JavaFX replaced Swing, Angular 8 replaced Angular 1.4 which had replaced Google Web Toolkit (GWT). This situation forces organizations to migrate their applications to modern frameworks regularly so they do not become obsolete. There has been resea...

Rotten Green Tests are tests that pass, but not because the assertions they contain are true: a rotten test passes because some or all of its assertions are not actually executed. The presence of a rotten green test is a test smell, and a bad one, because the existence of a test gives us false confidence that the code under test is valid, when in f...

One factor of success in software development companies is their ability to deliver good quality products, fast. For this, they need to improve their software development practices. We work with a medium-sized company modernizing its development practices. The company introduced several practices recommended in agile development. If the benefits of...

The Ethereum blockchain is a distributed database of transactions, where the Gas Oracles suggest the users the Gas price’s categories to get a transaction recorded. The paper explores the idea that the Gas Oracles are based on a data-centered model which does not provide users with a reliable prediction. We present an empirical study to test the re...

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03341735v1

Language Migration is a highly risky and complex process. Many authors have provided different ways to tackle down the problem, but it still not completely resolved, even-more it is considered almost impossible on many circumstances. Despite the approaches and solutions available, no work has been done on measuring the risks and complexity of a mig...

Language Migration is a highly risky and complex process.Many authors have provided different ways to tackle down the problem,but it still not completely resolved, even-more it is considered almostimpossible on many circumstances. Despite the approaches and solutionsavailable, no work has been done on measuring the risks and complexityof a migratio...

The paper questions whether data-driven and problem-driven models are sufficient for a software to automatically represent a meaningful graphical representation of scientific findings. The paper presents descriptive and prescriptive case studies to understand the benefits and the shortcomings of existing models that aim to provide graphical represe...

In several domains it is crucial to store and manipulate data whose origin needs to be completely traceable to guarantee the consistency, trustworthiness and reliability on the data itself typically for ethical and legal reasons. It is also important to guarantee that such properties are also carried further when such data is composed and processed...

Because Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is no longer actively maintained, Berger-Levrault decided to migrate its applications to Angular. We designed a semiautomated migration approach that helps developers migrate applications’ front ends from GWT to Angular and a tool that performs the migration.

Advanced reverse engineering tools are required to cope with the complexity of software systems and the specific requirements of numerous different tasks (re-architecturing, migration, evolution). Consequently, reverse engineering tools should adapt to a wide range of situations. Yet, because they require a large infrastructure investment, being ab...

Due to the technology evolution, every IT Company migrates their software systems at least once. Reengineering tools build system models which are used for running software analysis. These models are traditionally built from source code analysis and information accessible by data extractors (that we call such information observable). In this articl...

Advanced reverse engineering tools are required to cope with the complexity of software systems and the specific requirements of numerous different tasks (re-architecturing, migration, evolution). Consequently, reverse engineering tools should adapt to a wide range of situations. Yet, because they require a large infrastructure investment, being ab...

As applications get developed, bugs inevitably get introduced. Often, it is unclear why a given code change introduced a given bug. To find this causal relation and more effectively debug, developers can leverage the existence of a previous version of the code, without the bug. But traditional debug-ging tools are not designed for this type of work...

Relational databases play a central role in many information systems. Their schemas contain structural and behavioral entity descriptions. Databases must continuously be adapted to new requirements of a world in constant change while: (1) relational database management systems (RDBMS) do not allow inconsistencies in the schema; (2) stored procedure...

The term traits is overloaded in the literature. In this work we refer to traits as the stateless model and implementation described in Schaerli et al. articles. Traits provide a flexible way to support multiple inheritance code reuse in the context of a single inheritance language. The Pharo programming language includes the second implementation...

An important activity of software evolution consists in applying refactorings to enhance the quality of the code without changing its behaviour. Having a proper refactoring tool is a must-to in any professional development environment. In addition, live programming allows faster development than the usual edit-compile-debug process. During live pro...

Business Process (BP) development can be defined as the process of constructing a workflow application by composing a set of services performing BP's activities. In this respect, Cloud Services (CSs) are being increasingly used in BP development to ensure a high level of performance with a low operating cost. Although large companies may benefit fr...

Rotten green tests are passing tests which have, at least, one assertion not executed. They give developers a false confidence. In this paper, we present, RTj, a framework that analyzes test cases from Java projects with the goal of detecting and refactoring rotten test cases. RTj automatically discovered 427 rotten tests from 26 open-source Java p...

The second Workshop on Emerging Trends in Software Engineering for Blockchain (WETSEB 2019) intends to pursue the experience of WETSEB 2018 which inherited from the past eight editions of WETSoM (Workshop on Emerging Trends on Software Metrics) the challenges of gathering together researchers interested in emerging topics and trends in software eng...

Debugging is one of the most important and time consuming activities in software maintenance, yet mainstream debuggers are not well-adapted to several debugging scenarios. This has led to the research of new techniques covering specific families of complex bugs. Notably, recent research proposes to empower developers with scripting DSLs, plugin-bas...

Debugging is one of the most important and time consuming activities in software maintenance, yet mainstream debuggers are not well-adapted to several debugging scenarios. This has led to the research of new techniques covering specific families of complex bugs. Notably, recent research proposes to empower developers with scripting DSLs, plugin-bas...

In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, a major IT company, we are working on the migration of a GWT application to Angular. We focus on the GUI aspect of this migration which, even if both are web frameworks, is made difficult because they use different programming languages (Java for one, Typescript for the other) and different or...

—During the evolution of an application, it happens that developers must change the programming language. In the context of a collaboration with Berger-Levrault, a major IT company, we are working on the migration of a GWT application to Angular. We focus on the GUI aspect of this migration which, even if both frameworks are web Graphical User Inte...

Dynamic Software Update (DSU) solutions update applications while they are executing. These solutions are typically used in production to minimize application downtime, or in integrated development environments to provide live programming support. Each of these scenarios presents different challenges, forcing existing solutions to be designed with...

Empowering software engineers often requires to let them write code transformations. However existing automated or tool-supported approaches force developers to have a detailed knowledge of the internal representation of the underlying tool. While this knowledge is time consuming to master, the syntax of the language, on the other hand, is already...

Virtual machines, besides the interpreter and just-in-time compiler optimization facilities, also include a set of primitive operations that the client language can use. Some of these are essential and cannot be performed in any other way. Others are optional: they can be expressed in the client language but are often implemented in the virtual mac...

Even though blockchain is mostly popular for its cryptocurrency, smart contracts have become a very prominent blockchain application. Smart contracts are like classes that can be called by client applications outside the blockchain. Therefore it is possible to develop blockchain-oriented software (BOS) that implements part of the business logic in...

Blockchains store a massive amount of heterogeneous data which will only grow in time. When searching for data on the Ethereum platform, one is required to either access the records (blocks) directly by using a unique identifier, or sequentially search several records to find the desired information. Therefore, we propose the Ethereum Query Languag...