SCAM 2025
Sun 7 - Fri 12 September 2025 Auckland, New Zealand
co-located with ICSME 2025
Mon 8 Sep 2025 10:30 - 10:52 at OGGB5 260-051 - Analysis 1 Chair(s): Banani Roy

The ubiquitous use of third-party libraries in software development has enabled developers to quickly add new functionality to their client software. Unfortunately, library usage also carries a cost in terms of software maintenance: library upgrades may include breaking changes, in which client expectations about library behaviour are no longer met in new library versions. Behavioural breaking changes can be particularly insidious, and in their full generality, could require sophisticated program analysis techniques to (approximately) detect. In this work, we present our UnCheckGuard tool, which detects a class of behavioural breaking changes—those related to exceptions thrown by Java libraries. UnCheckGuard analyzes both sides of the library/client duet. On the library side, UnCheckGuard creates a list of new exceptions that may be thrown by methods in a library’s public API, including by its transitive callees. On the client side, UnCheckGuard identifies client methods that call library methods with new exceptions. To reduce false positives, UnCheckGuard additionally filters out new exceptions that cannot be triggered by particular clients, using taint analysis. It therefore can be used by client developers as a tool to screen library updates for relevant incompatibilities. We have evaluated UnCheckGuard on 302 libraries and 352 library-client pairs drawn from the DUETS collection and found 120 libraries with newly-added exceptions, as well as 1708 callsites to library methods which, when upgraded to the latest version, may introduce a behavioural breaking change in the client due to a newly added unchecked exception. These findings highlight the practical value of UnCheckGuard in identifying exception-related incompatibilities introduced by library upgrades.

Mon 8 Sep

Displayed time zone: Auckland, Wellington change

10:30 - 12:00
Analysis 1Research Track / Engineering Track at OGGB5 260-051
Chair(s): Banani Roy University of Saskatchewan
10:30
22m
Research paper
Detecting Exception-Related Behavioural Breaking Changes with UnCheckGuard
Research Track
Vinayak Sharma University of Waterloo, Patrick Lam University of Waterloo
Pre-print
10:52
22m
Research paper
Handling Cyclic Reinforcement of Lattice Values in Incremental Dependency-driven Static Analysis
Research Track
Jens Van der Plas Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Quentin Stiévenart Université du Québec à Montréal, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pre-print File Attached
11:15
22m
Research paper
Refactoring-Aware Patch Integration Across Structurally Divergent Java Forks
Research Track
Daniel Ogenrwot University of Nevada Las Vegas, John Businge University of Antwerp; Flanders Make; University of Nevada at Las Vegas
Pre-print Media Attached
11:37
22m
Research paper
Insights into Optimizing Research Software: A Case of an Architecture-Smell Detection Tool.
Engineering Track
Philipp Gnoyke , Sandro Schulze University of Magdeburg, Germany, Jacob Krüger Eindhoven University of Technology