Abstract
There are hundreds of programming languages available for software development today. As a result, modern software is increasingly developed in multiple languages. In this context, there is an urgent need for automated tools for multi-language software quality assurance. To that end, it is useful to first understand how languages are chosen by developers in multi-language software projects. One intuitive perspective towards the understanding would be to explore the potential functionality relevance of those choices. With a plethora of publicly hosted multi-language software projects available on GitHub, we were able to obtain thousands of popular, relevant repositories across 10 years from 2010 to 2019 to enable the exploration. We start by estimating the functionality domain of each project through topic modeling, followed by studying the statistical correlation between these domains and language selection over all the sample projects through association mining. We proceed with an evolutionary characterization of these projects to provide a longitudinal view of how the association has changed over the years. Our findings offer useful insights into the rationale behind developers' choices of language combinations in multi-language software construction.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings - 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings |
Editors | Natalia Juristo |
Place of Publication | Piscataway NJ USA |
Publisher | IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
Pages | 256-257 |
Number of pages | 2 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781665412193 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - May 2021 |
Event | International Conference on Software Engineering 2021 - Online, Madrid, Spain Duration: 25 May 2021 → 28 May 2021 Conference number: 43rd https://conf.researchr.org/committee/icse-2021/icse-2021-organizing-committe https://conf.researchr.org/home/icse-2021 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/9401807/proceeding (Proceedings) |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering |
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Publisher | IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers |
ISSN (Print) | 0270-5257 |
Conference
Conference | International Conference on Software Engineering 2021 |
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Abbreviated title | ICSE 2021 |
Country/Territory | Spain |
City | Madrid |
Period | 25/05/21 → 28/05/21 |
Internet address |
Keywords
- evolution
- functionality relevance
- language selection
- Multi-language software