Inferring and Applying Def-Use Like Configuration Couplings in Deployment Descriptors

When building enterprise applications on Java frameworks (e.g., Spring), developers often specify components and configure operations with a special kind of XML files named "deployment descriptors (DD)". Maintaining such XML files is challenging and time-consuming; because (1) the correct configuration semantics is domain-specific but usually vaguely documented, and (2) existing compilers and program analysis tools rarely examine XML files. To help developers ensure the quality of DD, this paper presents a novel approach-Xeditor-that extracts configuration couplings (i.e., frequently co-occurring configurations) from DD, and adopts the coupling rules to validate new or updated files. Xeditor has two phases: coupling extraction and bug detection. To identify couplings, Xeditor first mines DD in open-source projects, and extracts XML entity pairs that (i) frequently coexist in the same files and (ii) hold the same data at least once. Xeditor then applies customized association rule mining to the extracted pairs. For bug detection, given a new XML file, Xeditor checks whether the file violates any coupling; if so, Xeditor reports the violation(s). For evaluation, we first created two data sets with the 4,248 DD mined from 1,137 GitHub projects. According to the experiments with these data sets, Xeditor extracted couplings with high precision (73%); it detected bugs with 92% precision, 96% recall, and 94% accuracy. Additionally, we applied Xeditor to the version history of another 478 GitHub projects. Xeditor identified 25 very suspicious XML updates, 15 of which were later fixed by developers.