Title :
Applying bioinformatics in the analysis of software variants
Author :
Tenev, Vasil L. ; Duszynski, Slawomir
Author_Institution :
Fraunhofer Inst. for Exp. Software Eng. (IESE), Kaiserslautern, Germany
Abstract :
Analysis of software similarity is a lively research topic, particularly in the context of software maintenance and software reuse. There exist several approaches to detecting similar code inside one software system and across many systems. While working on similarity analysis of software variants, we observed many analogies between the approaches for analyzing evolution of software and of biological organisms. Hence, we applied bioinformatics concepts used in genome similarity analysis, such as alignments and phylogenetic trees, to software variants. We present the usefulness of these concepts by applying them to a group of related systems from the BSD Unix family.
Keywords :
Unix; bioinformatics; genomics; software maintenance; software reusability; BSD Unix family; alignments; bioinformatics application; biological organisms; genome similarity analysis; phylogenetic trees; similar code detection; software evolution; software maintenance; software reuse; software similarity analysis; software variant analysis; Bioinformatics; History; Phylogeny; Software algorithms; Software systems; bioinformatics; reverse engineering; software evolution; software variants; visualization;
Conference_Titel :
Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2012 IEEE 20th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Passau
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-1213-4
Electronic_ISBN :
1092-8138
DOI :
10.1109/ICPC.2012.6240499