A flexible framework for quality assurance of software artefacts with applications to Java, UML, and TTCN-3 test specifications

Manual reviews and inspections of software artefacts are time consuming and thus, automated analysis tools have been developed to support the quality assurance of software artefacts. Usually, software analysis tools are implemented for analysing only one specific language as target and for performing only one class of analyses. Furthermore, most software analysis tools support only common programming languages, but not those domain-specific languages that are used in a test process. As a solution, a framework for software analysis is presented that is based on a flexible, yet high-level facade layer that mediates between analysis rules and the underlying target software artefact; the analysis rules are specified using high-level XQuery expressions. Hence, further rules can be quickly added and new types of software artefacts can be analysed without needing to adapt the existing analysis rules. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by examples from using this framework to calculate metrics and detect bad smells in Java source code, in UML models, and in test specifications written using the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3).