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CW 427
Lieven Desmet, Frank Piessens, Wouter Joosen, Pierre Verbaeten
Dependency analysis of the GatorMail webmail application
Abstract
Nowadays, software systems are evolving towards modular composed applications, in which existing, loosely-coupled software components are reused in new compositions. In practice, these loosely-coupled software components tend to have quite often a set of hidden dependencies on other components in software systems.
In this report, we illustrate the complexity of inter-component dependencies in loosely-coupled software systems by exploring the dependencies in an existing component-based webmail application, GatorMail. We identify four types of dependencies in the GatorMail webmail application, resulting in more that 2000 dependencies.
By creating a better understanding of dependencies in software compositions, we hope to come to a better management of dependencies and to achieve more reliable software compositions.
Two versions of this report are available: a technical report and a shrinked version without the appendices (see below).
report.pdf (5.3M) / report without appendices.pdf (1.8M) / mailto: L. Desmet