SHF: Small: Reverse Engineering Variability Implementations

SHF：小型：逆向工程可变性实施

• 批准号: 1318808
• 负责人: Christian Kastner
• 金额: $ 40.08万
• 依托单位: Carnegie-Mellon University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1318808&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; Reverse; Engineering; Variability

Variability in software systems is very common and important to tailorthe system to user needs and to use the system flexibly in differentcontexts without developing a new system from scratch for each context.For example, embedded systems with resource constraints,high-performance optimizations, and end-user customizable systems allexploit variability. However variability in software systems creates afundamental tension between (a) reuse and (b) development andmaintenance costs. On the one hand, planning variability upfront enablessystematic reuse and promises to significantly reduce developmenteffort, costs, and time to market. On the other hand, variabilityrequires an upfront investment and causes long-term maintenance costs,because variations give rise to an exponential number of configurations with potentially intricate interactions. Especially if introduced inan ad-hoc fashion and not managed appropriately, variability canincrease maintenance costs to a level that outweighs the expectedbenefits. This research develops and integrates reverse-engineeringtechniques for variability to lower upfront investments for variabilityand to reduce the costs of long-term maintenance caused by accidentalcomplexity of existing ad-hoc variability implementations.This project revisits how variable and reusable software is implementedby encouraging lightweight and incremental implementation mechanisms andproviding migration mechanisms for all ad-hoc legacy implementationscommon in practice, including conditional compilation (#ifdef),branches, clones, textual patches, command-line parameters, andplug-ins. It integrates research from different communities, includingproduct- line analysis, static analysis, refactoring, concern location,and architecture recovery toward a common goal of reverse engineeringvariability implementations . This integration will allow scalingresearch and practice of analyzing and migrating variability from corecalculi to real-world systems of the size and complexity of the Linuxkernel.

软件系统的可变性是非常普遍和重要的，这对于根据用户需求定制系统以及在不同的上下文中灵活地使用系统而无需为每个上下文从头开始开发新系统非常重要。例如，具有资源限制的嵌入式系统、高性能优化和终端- 用户可定制的系统都利用了可变性。然而，软件系统的可变性在（a）重用和（b）开发和维护成本之间造成了根本的紧张关系。一方面，预先规划可变性可以实现系统重用，并有望显着减少开发工作量、成本和上市时间。另一方面，可变性需要前期投资并导致长期维护成本，因为可变性会产生指数数量的配置，并且可能存在复杂的交互。特别是如果以临时方式引入并且管理不当，可变性可能会将维护成本增加到超出预期收益的水平。 这项研究开发并集成了可变性的逆向工程技术，以降低可变性的前期投资，并减少因现有临时可变性实现的意外复杂性而导致的长期维护成本。该项目通过鼓励轻量级和增量式重新审视可变性和可重用软件的实现方式实现机制并为实践中常见的所有临时遗留实现提供迁移机制，包括条件编译（#ifdef）、分支、克隆、文本补丁、命令行参数、和插件。 它集成了来自不同社区的研究，包括产品线分析、静态分析、重构、关注点定位和架构恢复，以实现逆向工程可变性实现的共同目标。这种集成将允许扩展研究和实践，分析和迁移从核心计算到具有 Linux 内核大小和复杂性的现实系统的可变性。