Adelina-Diana STANA, Public Dissertation of PhD Thesis

Thesis Title: LEVERAGING VERSIONING SYSTEM INFORMATION TO IMPROVE METHODS AND TOOLS FOR LEGACY SOFTWARE ANALYSIS

PhD Board: 

President: Professor Univ. Dr. Eng. Marius George MARCU (Politehnica University of Timișoara)

          Scientific Coordinator: Professor  Emeritus Univ. Dr. Eng. Vladimir CREȚU (Politehnica University of Timișoara)

Referees: Professor Univ. Dr. Eng. Dorian GORGAN (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca) 

                 Professor Univ. Dr. Eng. Viorel NEGRU (West University of Timișoara)

                 Associate Professor Univ. Dr. Eng., PhD Ioana Șora (Politehnica University of Timișoara)

Thesis Summary:

This Ph.D. thesis addresses the analysis and improvement of methods for extracting, filtering, and integrating versioning system information in software engineering tasks. This thesis uses versioning information in the form of co-change patterns extracted from the versioning history of a software system, also called logical dependencies [1]. These dependencies can reveal

relationships that are not visible in the system’s static structure and can complement other types of dependencies, such as structural [2] and lexical dependencies [3]. The contributions of this thesis include the introduction of a new filtering metric for logical dependencies called connection strength, the development of a dedicated tool for logical dependency extraction and filtering, and the integration of logical dependencies into two software engineering tasks: key class detection [4,5] and software clustering for architectural reconstruction [6,7].