TY - GEN

T1 - A Longitudinal Study of Anti Micro Patterns in 113 Versions of Tomcat

AU - Destefanis, G.

AU - Qaderi, S.

AU - Bowes, D.

AU - Petric, Jean

AU - Ortu, M.

N1 - © 2018 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in PROMISE'18 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3273934.3273945

PY - 2018/10/10

Y1 - 2018/10/10

N2 - Background: Micro patterns represent design decisions in code. They are similar to design patterns and can be detected automatically. These micro structures can be helpful in identifying portions of code which should be improved (anti-micro patterns), or other well-designed parts which need to be preserved. The concepts expressed in these design decisions are defined at class-level; therefore the primary goal is to detect and provide information related to a specific granularity level. Aim: this paper aims to present preliminary results about a longitudinal study performed on anti-micro pattern distributions over 113 versions of Tomcat. Method: we first extracted the micro patterns from the 113 versions of Tomcat, then found the percentage of classes matching each of the six anti-micro pattern considered for this analysis, and studied correlations among the obtained time series after testing for stationarity, randomness and seasonality. Results: results show that the time series are stationary, not random (except for Function Pointer), and that additional studied are needed for studying seasonality. Regarding correlations, only the Pool and Record time series presented a correlation of 0.69, while moderate correlation has been found between Function Pointer and Function Object (0.58) and between Cobol Like and Pool (0.44).

AB - Background: Micro patterns represent design decisions in code. They are similar to design patterns and can be detected automatically. These micro structures can be helpful in identifying portions of code which should be improved (anti-micro patterns), or other well-designed parts which need to be preserved. The concepts expressed in these design decisions are defined at class-level; therefore the primary goal is to detect and provide information related to a specific granularity level. Aim: this paper aims to present preliminary results about a longitudinal study performed on anti-micro pattern distributions over 113 versions of Tomcat. Method: we first extracted the micro patterns from the 113 versions of Tomcat, then found the percentage of classes matching each of the six anti-micro pattern considered for this analysis, and studied correlations among the obtained time series after testing for stationarity, randomness and seasonality. Results: results show that the time series are stationary, not random (except for Function Pointer), and that additional studied are needed for studying seasonality. Regarding correlations, only the Pool and Record time series presented a correlation of 0.69, while moderate correlation has been found between Function Pointer and Function Object (0.58) and between Cobol Like and Pool (0.44).

KW - micro patterns

KW - software engineering

KW - time series analysis

U2 - 10.1145/3273934.3273945

DO - 10.1145/3273934.3273945

M3 - Conference contribution/Paper

SN - 9781450365932

T3 - PROMISE'18

SP - 90

EP - 93

BT - PROMISE'18 Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering

PB - ACM

CY - New York, NY, USA

ER -