Just-In-Time Checking of Software Development Regulations in Change Intensive Process

Abstract

Agile software development processes are widely adopted in software development teams that highly value responsiveness to changes In agile processes configuration managers typically specify certain software development regulations on software artifacts (i e program element naming standards forbidden bad smells preserve design structures) to continuously maintain the design quality of software systems along with their evolution paths Currently development teams lack an in-time and flexible checking mechanism for rapid identification of regulation violations Without such a mechanism regulations are not effectively enforced in development teams Consequently regulation violations are easily introduced to software systems and would bring long-term negative impact to software evolution To this point these thesis proposes a tool named ``CommittingGuard' with its domain-specific language (DSL) to support the in-time checking for software development regulations are proposed in this thesis The configuration manager can use the DSL to specify customized committing rules These committing rules are treated as the must-adhered standard by each programmer who attempt to commit software change Rule-violating commits are stopped by CommittingGuard right at the commit time This way regulation checking is carried out ``Just-In-Time' and violations can be fixed rapidly Two studies on empirical software development regulations have been conducted to confirm the effectiveness of CommittingGuard

Date of Award	2014 Sept 4
Original language	English
Supervisor	Hewijin-Christine Jiau (Supervisor)