Identifying mandatory code for framework use via a single application trace

Abstract

Application frameworks allow application developers to effectively reuse both designs and implementations which frequently appear in their intended domains. However, when using a framework with large scale APIs, its usage to implement an application-specific behavior tends to be complicated. Thus, in practice, application developers use existing sample application code as references for their development, but the task to locate the parts which are related to their application usually becomes a burden. To address this problem, in this paper, we characterize the problem as a kind of dynamic flow analysis problem, and based on the characterization, we present a method to automatically identify the mandatory code for the framework use using only a single sample application's trace. We have conducted case studies with several real-world frameworks to validate our method and the results indicate that the method is suitable to extract the mandatory framework usage. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.