Pedro Resende

Miguel Terra-Neves, José Amaral, Alexandre Lemos et al.

Graph matching is a fundamental problem in pattern recognition, with many applications such as software analysis and computational biology. One well-known type of graph matching problem is graph isomorphism, which consists of deciding if two graphs are identical. Despite its usefulness, the properties that one may check using graph isomorphism are rather limited, since it only allows strict equality checks between two graphs. For example, it does not allow one to check complex structural properties such as if the target graph is an arbitrary length sequence followed by an arbitrary size loop. We propose a generalization of graph isomorphism that allows one to check such properties through a declarative specification. This specification is given in the form of a Regular Graph Pattern (ReGaP), a special type of graph, inspired by regular expressions, that may contain wildcard nodes that represent arbitrary structures such as variable-sized sequences or subgraphs. We propose a SAT-based algorithm for checking if a target graph matches a given ReGaP. We also propose a preprocessing technique for improving the performance of the algorithm and evaluate it through an extensive experimental evaluation on benchmarks from the CodeSearchNet dataset.

Miguel Terra-Neves, João Nadkarni, Miguel Ventura et al.

Visual Programming Languages (VPLs), coupled with the high-level abstractions that are commonplace in visual programming environments, enable users with less technical knowledge to become proficient programmers. However, the lower skill floor required by VPLs also entails that programmers are more likely to not adhere to best practices of software development, producing systems with high technical debt, and thus poor maintainability. Duplicated code is one important example of such technical debt. In fact, we observed that the amount of duplication in the OutSystems VPL code bases can reach as high as $39\%$. Duplicated code detection in text-based programming languages is still an active area of research with important implications regarding software maintainability and evolution. However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature on duplicated code detection for VPLs is very limited. We propose a novel and scalable duplicated code pattern mining algorithm that leverages the visual structure of VPLs in order to not only detect duplicated code, but also highlight duplicated code patterns that explain the reported duplication. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on a wide range of real-world mobile and web applications developed using OutSystems.