Analyzing Changes in Software Systems: From ChangeDistiller to FMDiff

Speaker:        Professor Martin Pinzger
                University of Klagenfurt
                Austria

Title:          "Analyzing Changes in Software Systems: From
                 ChangeDistiller to FMDiff"

Date:           Thursday, 23 July 2015

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Room 3501 (via lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Software systems continuously change and developers spent a large portion
of their time in keeping track and understanding changes and their
effects. Current development tools provide only limited support. Most of
all, they track changes in source files only on the level of textual lines
lacking semantic and context information on changes. Developers frequently
need to reconstruct this information manually which is a time consuming
and error prone task. In this talk, I present three techniques to address
this problem by extracting detailed syntactical information from changes
in various source files. I start with introducing ChangeDistiller, a tool
and approach to extract information on source code changes on the level of
ASTs. Next, I present the WSDLDiff approach to extract information on
changes in web services interface description files. Finally, I present
FMDiff, an approach to extract changes from feature models defined with
the linux Kconfig language. For each approach I report on cases studies
and experiments to highlight the benefits of our techniques. I also point
out several research opportunities opened by our techniques and tools, and
the detailed data on changes extracted by them.


********************
Biography:

Martin Pinzger is a Full Professor of Software Engineering and the head of
the Software Engineering Research Group at the University of Klagenfurt,
Austria. He is currently also serving as chair of the Institute of
Informatics Systems. Martin Pinzger received a MSc (Dipl. Ing.) in 2001
and PhD (Dr. techn.) in 2005 in informatics from the Vienna University of
Technology, both with distinction. He was a Postdoc at the University of
Zurich and an Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology
from which he received tenure in 2012. His research interests are in
software engineering with a focus on software evolution, software quality,
mining software repositories, software visualization, software design, and
empirical studies in software engineering. In 2012, he won a prestigious
NWO Vidi grant for his research proposal on recording and analysis of
fine-grained code changes. In 2013, he received an ICSE 2013 ACM SIGSOFT
distinguished paper award for his work on data clone detection in