Supporting the adaptation of open‐source database applications through extracting data lifecycles

The adaptation of open‐source database applications is common in the industry. Most open‐source database applications are incomplete. During adaptation, users usually have to implement additional data maintenance. Hence, the completeness of an application is an important concern for the adaptation as a key factor to indicate how much additional effort is required before using a system. From our study of database applications with complete functionalities, we observe that data in a database has common patterns of lifecycles. Anomaly in data lifecycles provides a good indicator on the completeness of database applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatically extract the data lifecycles out of the source code of database applications through inter‐procedural static program analysis. This representative information can benefit the adaptation of database applications specifically for selection, maintenance and extension. We have developed a tool to implement the proposed approach for PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)‐based database applications. Case studies have shown that the proposed approach is useful in assisting adaptation and detecting faults of open‐source database applications.