AJANA: a general framework for source-code-level interprocedural dataflow analysis of AspectJ software

ABSTRACT

Aspect-oriented software presents new challenges for the designers of static analyses. Our work aims to establish systematic foundations for dataflow analysis of AspectJ software. We propose a control- and data-flow program representation for AspectJ programs, as basis for subsequent interprocedural dataflow analyses. The representation is built at the source code level and captures the semantic intricacies of various pointcut designators, multiple applicable advices per joint point, dynamic advices, and general flow of data to, from, and between advices. We also propose two dataflow analyses for AspectJ software: (1) a novel object effect analysis based on a flow- and context-sensitive must-alias analysis, and (2) a dependence analysis used for constructing the system dependence graph for slicing, refactoring, change impact analysis, etc. Both analyses are representative of a general category of dataflow analyses referred to as interprocedural distributed environment (IDE) problems. The two analyses are built on top of the proposed representation, and take into account the complex flow of control and data due to aspect-oriented features. We present a study of the proposed techniques on 37 program versions, using our Ajana analysis framework which is based on the abc AspectJ compiler. The results show that the representation can be built efficiently, that it is superior to an approach based on the woven bytecode, and that it enables analyses that are both faster and more precise. These findings strongly indicate that the proposed approach is a promising candidate for a foundation upon which various inter-procedural analyses for AspectJ can be designed and built.

References

1. AspectBench Compiler. abc.comlab.ox.ac.uk.
2. AspectJ Compiler. www.aspectj.org.
3. P. Avgustinov, A. S. Christensen, L. Hendren, S. Kuzins, J. Lhoták, O. Lhoták, O. de Moor, D. Sereni, G. Sittampalam, and J. Tibble. Building the abc AspectJ compiler with Polyglot and Soot. Technical Report abc-2004-4, abc Group, Dec. 2004.
4. P. Avgustinov, A. S. Christensen, L. Hendren, S. Kuzins, J. Lhoták, O. Lhoták, O. de Moor, D. Sereni, G. Sittampalam, and J. Tibble. abc: An extensible AspectJ compiler. In AOSD, pages 87--98, 2005.
5. P. Avgustinov, A. S. Christensen, L. Hendren, S. Kuzins, J. Lhoták, O. Lhoták, O. de Moor, D. Sereni, G. Sittampalam, and J. Tibble. Optimising AspectJ. In PLDI, pages 117--128, 2005.
6. P. Avgustinov, E. Hajiyev, N. Ongkingco, O. de Moor, D. Sereni, J. Tibble, and M. Verbaere. Semantics of static pointcuts in AspectJ. In POPL, pages 11--23, 2007.
7. D. Callahan. The program summary graph and flow-sensitive interprocedural data flow analysis. In PLDI, pages 47--56, 1988.
8. S. Cherem, L. Princehouse, and R. Rugina. Practical memory leak detection using guarded value-flow analysis. In PLDI, pages 480--491, 2007.
9. M. Das, S. Lerner, and M. Seigle. ESP: Path-sensitive program verification in polynomial time. In PLDI, pages 57--68, 2002.
10. R. DeLine and M. Fähndrich. Typestates for objects. In ECOOP, LNCS 3086, pages 465--490, 2004.
11. N. Dor, S. Adams, M. Das, and Z. Yang. Software validation via scalable path-sensitive value flow analysis. In ISSTA, pages 12--22, 2004.
12. B. Dufour, C. Goard, L. Hendren, O. de Moor, G. Sittampalam, and C. Verbrugge. Measuring the dynamic behaviour of AspectJ programs. In OOPSLA, pages 150--169, 2004.
13. S. Fink, E. Yahav, N. Dor, G. Ramalingam, and E. Geay. Effective typestate verification in the presence of aliasing. In ISSTA, pages 133--144, 2006.
14. D. Grove and C. Chambers. A framework for call graph construction algorithms. TOPLAS, 23(6):685--746, Nov. 2001.
15. N. Heintze. Set Based Program Analysis. PhD thesis, Carnegie Mellon University, 1992.
16. S. Horwitz, T. Reps, and D. Binkley. Interprocedural slicing using dependence graphs. TOPLAS, 12(1):26--60, 1990.
17. T. Ishio, S. Kusumoto, and K. Inoue. Debugging support for aspect-oriented program based on program slicing and call graph. In ICSM, pages 178--187, 2004.
18. G. Kiczales, E. Hilsdale, J. Hugunin, M. Kersten, J. Palm, and W. Griswold. An overview of AspectJ. In ECOOP, LNCS 2072, pages 327--353, 2001.
19. L. Larsen and M. J. Harrold. Slicing object-oriented software. In ICSE, pages 495--505, 1996.
20. R. Manevich, M. Sridharan, S. Adams, M. Das, and Z. Yang. PSE: Explaining program failures via postmortem static analysis. In FSE, pages 63--72, 2004.
21. T. Marlowe and B. G. Ryder. Properties of data flow frameworks: A unified model. Acta Informatica, 28:121--163, 1990.
22. T. Reps, M. Sagiv, and S. Horwitz. Interprocedural dataflow analysis via graph reachability. Technical Report DIKU-TR94-14, University of Copenhagen, Apr. 1994.
23. M. Rinard, A. Salcianu, and S. Bugrara. A classification system and analysis for aspect-oriented programs. In FSE, pages 147--158, 2004.
24. A. Rountev and B. H. Connell. Object naming analysis for reverse-engineered sequence diagrams. In ICSE, pages 254--263, 2005.
25. M. Sagiv, T. Reps, and S. Horwitz. Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis with applications to constant propagation. Theoretical Computer Science, 167(1--2):131--170, 1996.
26. M. Sharir and A. Pnueli. Two approaches to interprocedural data flow analysis. In S. Muchnick and N. Jones, editors, Program Flow Analysis: Theory and Applications, pages 189--234. Prentice Hall, 1981.
27. S. Sinha, M. J. Harrold, and G. Rothermel. System-dependence-graph-based slicing of programs with arbitrary interprocedural control flow. In ICSE, pages 432--441, 1999.
28. http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot.
29. F. Tip. A survey of program slicing techniques. Journal of Programming Languages, 3:121--189, 1995.
30. F. Tip and J. Palsberg. Scalable propagation-based call graph construction algorithms. In OOPSLA, pages 281--293, 2000.
31. J. Whaley and M. Rinard. Compositional pointer and escape analysis for Java programs. In OOPSLA, pages 187--206, 1999.
32. T. Xie and J. Zhao. A framework and tool supports for generating test inputs of AspectJ programs. In AOSD, pages 190--201, 2006.
33. G. Xu and A. Rountev. Regression test selection for AspectJ software. In ICSE, pages 65--74, 2007.
34. J. Zhao. Change impact analysis for aspect-oriented software evolution. In International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution, pages 108--112, 2002.
35. J. Zhao. Slicing aspect-oriented software. In IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension, pages 251--260, 2002.
36. J. Zhao. Data-flow-based unit testing of aspect-oriented programs. In International Computer Software and Applications Conference, page 188, 2003.
37. J. Zhao and M. Rinard. System dependence graph construction for aspect-oriented programs. In MIT-LCS-TR-891, 2003.

Index Terms

• Theory of computation

  • Semantics and reasoning

    • Program reasoning

      • Program analysis

    • Program semantics