An Approach Based on Structural Differences to Expedite Applying OSS Updates to Products

Abstract

Open source software (OSS)-based product development takes advantage of feature updates and bug fixes from OSS communities. However, when we customize the OSS and do not return the changes back to the OSS communities, our customization and the updates sometimes conflict. That makes it difficult to apply forthcoming OSS updates since we need to grasp the software changes appropriately. We propose a method to visualize software's structural differences using call graph. We have applied the method to a product development process and found that our method helps developers to speed up the application of OSS updates and reduce update errors. We have also found that solely providing call graph is insufficient for them to check the differences. They need more detailed information, e.g. data flow, as well as a guide to utilize the difference information to resolve the conflicts.