Applications of Build Time View

1
Applications of Build Time View

• Xinyi Dong, Michael Godfrey
• Software Architecture Group
• University of Waterloo

2
BTV and BTV Toolkit

• BTV
• Build-time architecture view, which captures the
  structural and behavioral properties that are
  apparent only at system build time.
• BTV Toolkit
• A toolkit to extract and visualize BTV.

3
An Example of BTV
goal
target
depend-on
invoke
directory
4
Applications of BTV

• Detecting build-time variation points
• Studying system changes

5
Detecting Build-time Variation Points

• Background
• Software variants
• Variation points
• A variation point is the location in a software
  asset where the variation will occur.

6
Detecting Build-time Variation Points

• Knowledge of variation points can help us
  understand and maintain software system.
• Variation points are not represented explicitly.
• Open-source systems have many build-time
  variation points.

7
Detecting Build-time Variation Points

• Our approach
• Compare BTVs of different instantiations of
  variants
• Case study
• Linux file system

8
Detecting Build-time Variation Points
sub_dirs dummy (subdir-list)
9
Detecting Build-time Variation Points
modules (ALL_MOBJS) dummy \ (patsubst
,_modsubdir_,(MOD_DIRS))
10
Studying Software Changes

• Most BTV targets represent files.
• Most BTV changes are caused by changes of
  software systems.
• Our approach
• Compare the BTVs of adjacent versions
• Case study
• PostgreSQL

11
Studying Software Changes
12
Studying Software Changes
Similarity
version
13
Studying Software Changes
of make processes
of Changed make processes of Added/Rmd make
processes
version
Changes in users frontend
of make processes
of Changed make processes of Added/Rmd make
processes
version
Changes in backend server
14
Conclusion

• BTV is a file-level architecture view.
• Our approach of using BTV in both applications is
• Lightweight
• Flexible
• At coarse level