Seminar by Dr. Anthony Cleve (University of Namur)

Speaker: Dr. Anthony Cleve (University of Namur)                                                                                                                        

Title: Analyzing the evolution of data-intensive systems

Date: Friday April 12, 2019

Time: 11am  

Room:  EV011.119

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, software systems are ubiquitous, and a large part of our modern life deeply depends on them. Yet they are considered as one of the most complex artefacts ever built by human beings. In particular, maintaining such systems has long been recognized as a crucial, complex and costly task, which is especially due to the lack of sufficient documentation.

In this context, understanding the software system constitutes a prerequisite of the maintenance and evolution processes. This understanding step, also called reverse engineering, may represent up to 50% of the total maintenance effort.
It has also been shown that understanding the evolution history of a complex software system can significantly aid the reverse engineering step and inform future system maintenance and evolution initiatives. Software repositories such as version management systems provide excellent opportunities for historical analyses. Most research work in this area has been concentrated on program code, design and architecture, but little attention has been devoted to the database of the system. This is an unfortunate gap as many software systems are data-intensive, i.e., their central artefact is a database.

Understanding the database schema which captures domain-specific concepts, data structures and integrity constraints may constitute a prerequisite to understanding the source code of the system as well as its evolution. Similarly, determining which fragments of the source code access certain parts of the database may be of crucial importance in the context of various software evolution scenarios such as migrating the application towards a new database platform, evolving the data structures to meet changing requirements, or assessing the quality of the overall system.
The goal of our ongoing research effort is to reduce this gap by considering the evolution history of the database and its manipulation by the source code as an additional information source to inform software evolution tasks. In this talk, we will summarize our recent achievements towards this goal. In particular, we will present DAHLIA (Database ScHema EvoLutIon Analysis), a visual analyzer of database schema evolution and manipulation. This tool mines the database schema evolution history from the software repository and allows its interactive, visual analysis.

Through a sophisticated static analysis approach, DAHLIA also allows developers to identify and analyse database accesses in highly dynamic systems and to formulate recommendations about the impact of database schema changes on the programs. We will then report on the use of DAHLIA to analyse large-scale data-intensive systems including OSCAR, a large open-source information system that is widely used in the healthcare industry in Canada.

BIO

Anthony Cleve is a professor in information system evolution at University of Namur, where he serves as Vice-Dean of the faculty of Computer Science. He is a member of the PReCISE research center and of the Namur Digital Institute (NADI). Previously, Anthony was an ERCIM post-doctoral research fellow at INRIA Lille (2009-2010). He holds an MSc degree (2004) and a PhD degree (2009) in Computer Science from the University of Namur. Anthony also worked as visiting researcher at CWI, Amsterdam (2005-2006).

Anthony's research interests include information system maintenance and evolution, software and data reverse engineering, program analysis and transformation, self-adaptive and context-aware systems. His full CV is available here.

Anthony loves riddles, good night songs, silent words and smiles, and all the tiny beautiful details that one can only discover by coincidence.