GraphEvo: Evaluating Software Evolution Using Machine Learning Based Call Graph Analytics And Network Portrait Divergence
Date
2022Metadata
[+] Show full item recordAbstract
Understanding software evolution is essential for software development tasks, including debugging, maintenance, and testing. Unfortunately, as software changes, it becomes more prominent and more complicated, which makes it harder to understand. Software Defect Prediction (SDP) in the codebase is one of the most common ways artificial intelligence (AI) is used to improve the quality of agile products. But graph-based software metrics are seldom used in the software.
In this dissertation, we propose a graph-based software framework called GraphEvo based on deep learning modeling for graphs. We applied the recent network comparison advancement to software networks via information theory-based metric Network portrait divergence (NPD). NPD captures the structural changes to call graph-based software networks. The NPD-based method determines what significant software changes are, how much execution paths are affected, and how tests are improved concerning the code. All of these factors affect how reliable the software is. To ensure that NPD-based software works well, version controls and Pull Requests (PRs) are used.
GraphEvo's most significant contributions are: (i) Find and show how software has changed over time using call graphs. (ii) Using a machine learning and deep learning techniques to understand the software and guess how many defects are in each code entity (such as a class). (iii) Use the NPD-based tooling to create a public bug dataset and machine learning to see how well it can predict software defects. (iv) Help with the PR review process by knowing how the changes to code and tests that go with them work.
We compared the performance of GraphEvo (i) across 66 software releases from five popular Java open-source systems to show that it works, (ii) for 9 Java projects and deep learning to make an SDP model, (iii) for 19 Java projects of different sizes and types from GitHub and to add bug information from other places, and (iv) for 627 PRs from 14 Java projects to see how vital tests are in PRs. These comprehensive experiments show that GraphEvo works well for debugging, maintaining, and testing software. We also received favorable responses from user studies, in which we asked software developers and testers what they thought of GraphEvo.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Characterizing and understanding software evolution using call graphs -- Defect prediction using deep learning with NPD for software evolution -- NPD-based tooling, extendible defect dataset and its assessment -- Reviewing pull requests with path-based NPD and tests
Degree
Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)