Mining Evolution Of Object Usage

As software evolves, so does the interaction between its components. But how can we check if components are updated consistently? By abstracting object usage into temporal properties, we can learn evolution patterns that express how object usage evolves over time. Software can then be checked against these patterns, revealing code that is in need of update: "Your check for isValidWidget() is now superseded by checkWidget()." In an evaluation of seven different versions of three open source projects, our LAMARCK tool was able to detect existing code issues with a precision of 33%-64% and to prevent such issues with a precision of 90%-100%.