Client-Specific Upgrade Compatibility Checking via Knowledge-Guided Discovery

Abstract

Modern software systems are complex, and they heavily rely on external libraries developed by different teams and organizations. Such systems suffer from higher instability due to incompatibility issues caused by library upgrades. In this article, we address the problem by investigating the impact of a library upgrade on the behaviors of its clients. We developed CompCheck , an automated upgrade compatibility checking framework that generates incompatibility-revealing tests based on previous examples. CompCheck first establishes an offline knowledge base of incompatibility issues by mining from open source projects and their upgrades. It then discovers incompatibilities for a specific client project, by searching for similar library usages in the knowledge base and generating tests to reveal the problems. We evaluated CompCheck on 202 call sites of 37 open source projects and the results show that CompCheck successfully revealed incompatibility issues on 76 call sites, 72.7% and 94.9% more than two existing techniques, confirming CompCheck ’s applicability and effectiveness.