Software Change Contracts
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Date
2012-03-30T09:16:26Z
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Abstract
Incorrect program changes including regression bugs, incorrect bugfixes, incorrect feature updates are pervasive in software. These incorrect program changes affect software quality and are difficult to detect/correct. In this paper, we propose the notion of “change
contracts" to avoid incorrect program changes. Change contracts formally specify the intended effect of program changes. Incorrect program changes are detected when they are checked with respect to the change contracts. We design a change contract language for Java programs and a dynamic checking system for our change contract
language. General guidelines as well as concrete examples are given to illustrate the usage of our change contracts. We conduct an user study to check the expressiveness of our change contract language and find that the language is expressive enough to capture a wide variety of real-life changes in three large software projects (Ant, JMeter, log4j). Finally, our contract checking system detects several real-life incorrect changes in these three software projects via runtime checking of the change contracts.