A lightweight transformational approach to support large scale adaptive changes

An approach to automate adaptive maintenance changes on large-scale software systems is presented. This approach uses lightweight parsing and lightweight on-the-fly static analysis to support transformations that make corrections to source code in response to adaptive maintenance changes, such as platform changes. SrcML, an XML source code representation, is used and transformations can be performed using either XSLT or LINQ. A number of specific adaptive changes are presented, based on recent adaptive maintenance needs from products at ABB Inc. The transformations are described in detail and then demonstrated on a number of examples from the production systems. The results are compared with manual adaptive changes that were done by professional developers. The approach performed better than the manual changes, as it successfully transformed instances missed by the developers while not missing any instances itself. The work demonstrates that this lightweight approach is both efficient and accurate with an overall cost savings in development time and effort.