Cross-language Code Coupling Detection: A Preliminary Study on Android Applications

Abstract

Framework-based multi-lingual software is increasingly prevalent, but it also brings negative effects and extra burden on software maintenance and evolution, because of the introduced cross-language code coupling, which are usually mixed with framework-specific conventions. Researchers have proposed various approaches to code coupling detection, but there is still a lack of necessary support for cross-language coupling detection in framework-based software development. In this paper, we present a preliminary study about cross-language coupling detection in software development based on the Android application framework. We investigate the characteristics of multi-lingual changes in the top-100 starred open-source Android repositories on GitHub, and find that multi-lingual commits are non-trivial: their code changes are more scattered, and more inclined to introduce bugs than other commits. To mitigate the side-effect of multi-lingual development, we propose Grace, a Graph-based cross-language co-change suggestion approach for Android application development. Grace (a) designs a language-agnostic graph to represent code elements from different languages, and (b) employs an entity-based collaborative filtering algorithm to detect and rank candidates of cross-language code couplings, from the graph representation of the latest version as well as the historical multi-lingual commits of a repository. To evaluate the effectiveness of Grace, we apply it to the two tasks of cross-language co-change suggestion and inconsistency checking. Results show that Grace (a) can effectively suggest cross-language co-changed files and types, and (b) can also find existing and potential bugs or code smells caused by inconsistent co-changes.