Article

A method for detecting faulty code violating implicit coding rules

Authors:

Tomoko Matsumura,

Akito Monden, and

Ken-ichi MatsumotoAuthors Info & Claims

IWPSE '02: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

May 2002

Pages 15 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/512035.512040

Published: 19 May 2002 Publication History

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Abstract

In the field of legacy software maintenance, there unexpectedly arise a large number of implicit coding rules --- which are seldom written down in specification documents or design documents --- as software becomes more complicated than it used be. Since not all the members in a maintenance team realize each of implicit coding rules, a maintainer who is not aware of a rule often violates the rule while doing various maintenance activities such as adding new functionality and repairing faults. The problem here is not only such a violation causes injection of a new fault into software but also this violation will be repeated again and again in the future by different maintainers. Indeed, we found that 32.7% of faults of certain legacy software were due to such violations.This paper proposes a method for detecting code fragments that violate implicit coding rules. In the method, an expert maintainer firstly investigates the causes, situations, and code fragments of each fault described in bug reports; and, identifies implicit coding rules as much as possible. Then, code patterns violating the rules (which we call bug code patterns) are described in a pattern description language. Finally, potential faulty code fragments are extracted by a pattern matching technique.

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Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Recovering system specific rules from software repositoriesProceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories10.1145/1083142.1083144(1-5)Online publication date: 17-May-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1083142.1083144
Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Recovering system specific rules from software repositoriesACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/1082983.108314430:4(1-5)Online publication date: 17-May-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1082983.1083144
Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Automatic Mining of Source Code Repositories to Improve Bug Finding TechniquesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2005.6331:6(466-480)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2005.63
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Index Terms

A method for detecting faulty code violating implicit coding rules
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

IWPSE '02: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

May 2002

155 pages

ISBN:1581135459

DOI:10.1145/512035

Conference Chair:
Mikio Aoyama
Nanzan University, Japan
,
Program Chairs:
Katsuro Inoue
Osaka University, Japan
,
Vaclav Rajlich
Wayne State University, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 May 2002

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SIGSOFT

IWPSE02: International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution

May 19 - 20, 2002

Florida, Orlando

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Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Recovering system specific rules from software repositoriesProceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories10.1145/1083142.1083144(1-5)Online publication date: 17-May-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1083142.1083144
Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Recovering system specific rules from software repositoriesACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/1082983.108314430:4(1-5)Online publication date: 17-May-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1082983.1083144
Williams CHollingsworth J(2005)Automatic Mining of Source Code Repositories to Improve Bug Finding TechniquesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2005.6331:6(466-480)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2005.63
Hammouda IHarsu M(2004)Documenting maintenance tasks using maintenance patternsEighth European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, 2004. CSMR 2004. Proceedings.10.1109/CSMR.2004.1281404(37-47)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSMR.2004.1281404
O'Reilly CMorrow PBustard D(2003)Lightweight prevention of architectural erosionSixth International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution, 2003. Proceedings.10.1109/IWPSE.2003.1231211(59-64)Online publication date: 2003
https://doi.org/10.1109/IWPSE.2003.1231211
Matsumura TMonden AMatsumoto K(2002)The detection of faulty code violating implicit coding rulesProceedings International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering10.1109/ISESE.2002.1166936(173-182)Online publication date: 2002
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISESE.2002.1166936

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The Detection of Faulty Code Violating Implicit Coding Rules

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Understanding and Detecting Harmful Code