Mining Software Contracts for Software Evolution

Abstract

Maintenance and evolution are important parts for all successful software projects. In recent years, version control systems have played a key role in software development process. Not only do they provide a means to coordinate programmers, organize and manage source code, but they also persist the evolution history of the source code into their software repositories. Mining software repositories has provided many insights on the evolution of software, both for researchers and practitioners. In this paper we propose that versioned software contracts--mined from software repositories--can be a powerful tool for better understanding and supporting software evolution. Tooling support is critical, due to the complexities of configuring, compiling, and running the software to produce meaningful inferred contracts. This paper contributes both techniques and tool support for downloading, building, and analyzing open source software from social coding sites like GitHub. The tool automatically produces a description of software evolution represented by versions of program invariants.