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Negligible Details - Towards Abstracting Source Code to Distill the Essence of Concepts

Authors:
Christian Schindler
Mirco Schindler
Andreas Rausch

Keywords: Software Abstraction, Object Oriented Language, Design Pattern, Source Code Comprehension, Software Architecture

Abstract:
Design and architecture patterns are proven domain-independent solution approaches for common problems occurring in the development of software systems. To guarantee the problem-solving capabilities of patterns, a correct implementation of the design pattern is essential. As a context-specific adoption of the design pattern to the software system needs to be performed by the developers, we argue that their comprehension plays a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of such correct implementations over the system's lifespan. Even with migration and integration of legacy components into an adaptive System, where other paradigms are used, for example, must be compatible on a conceptual level. The primary intent of this paper is to separate essential syntactic information from varying aspects, given a set of implementation samples. We introduce an approach that abstracts given object-oriented implementations by semantically resolving and splitting an Abstract Syntax Tree into small paths. In analyzing paths from given samples we build a shared concept. In this paper, we build the shared concept from 230 example implementations containing the singleton design pattern and 230 counterexamples to classify new unseen java classes. The contribution this paper provides is composed of three parts. (i) A novel approach to abstract object-oriented code, (ii) an interpretable way to identify common parts extracted from multiple abstractions, and (iii) a way to classify unseen samples to implement the same concept.

Pages: 22 to 31

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2022

Publication date: April 24, 2022

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4146

ISBN: 978-1-61208-951-5

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Dates: from April 24, 2022 to April 28, 2022