ALTA: Automatic Load-Time Adaptation Technique for Refactoring-Based Evolution of Software Component

Evolution of software components may lead to compatibility problems. State-of-the-art fully-automatic compatibility solutions either require source code, or they fail to support refactorings that may lead to conflict method signatures, such as changing the order of same-typed parameters or changing return types. Moreover, all of them will statically modify source or binary files, which may violate the license agreements of components. In this paper, we propose ALTA, a fully-automatic adaptation technique for refactoring-based evolution of software component. ALTA supports refactorings that may lead to conflict method signatures. In addition, ALTA can perform load-time adaptation, and therefore it can work under all kinds of license agreements. We also present ALTA*, an implementation of ALTA by Java and AspectJ. The evaluation results show that ALTA* effectively solves compatibility problems in real-world components with a performance overhead of load-time adaptation feature (if enabled) at around 11%.