Polylingual Dependency Analysis Using Island Grammars: A Cost Versus Accuracy Evaluation

Software dependency analysis is an important step in determining the potential impact of changes. Existing tool support for conducting dependency analysis does not sufficiently support systems written in more than one language. Tools based on semantic analyses are expensive to create for combinations of multiple languages, while lexical tools provide poor accuracy and rely heavily on developer skill. This paper reports on an investigation into the application of a series of incrementally-better island grammars to an industrial, open-source polylingual system to determine the cost-to-accuracy relationship involved in developing and applying island grammars for dependency analysis. The results of our study suggest the effort-cost in writing richer island grammars rises faster than the resulting accuracy.