Jonathan I. Maletic

An in-depth investigation of C preprocessor usage for portability and configuration management is presented. Three heavily-ported and widely used C++ libraries are examined. A core set of header files responsible for configuration management is identified in each system. Then macro usage is extracted and analyzed both manually and with the help of program analysis tools. The configuration structure of each library is discussed in details and commonalities between the systems, including conventions and patterns are discussed. A common configuration architecture for managing portability concerns is derived and presented.

The paper introduces the use of onion graphs as a focus+context technique for visualizing large UML class models. The focus area, which can be manually or automatically derived, is visualized using the standard UML notations. The remainder of the model is abstracted (context) and presented at varying levels of detail in onion notation. A selective aggregation technique for achieving the abstractions is presented. Finally, the technique is demonstrated by examples on two subsystems of an open source project.

A comprehensive literature survey on approaches for mining software repositories (MSR) in the context of software evolution is presented. In particular, this survey deals with those investigations that examine multiple versions of software artifacts or other temporal information. A taxonomy is derived from the analysis of this literature and presents the work via four dimensions: the type of software repositories mined (what), the purpose (why), the adopted/invented methodology used (how), and the evaluation method (quality). The taxonomy is demonstrated to be expressive (i.e., capable of representing a wide spectrum of MSR investigations) and effective (i.e., facilitates similarities and comparisons of MSR investigations). Lastly, a number of open research issues in MSR that require further investigation are identified. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.