VaRA Tool Suite

Project Status

branch	build status
vara
vara-dev

Using VaRA with VaRA-TS

VaRA is a variability-aware framework to analyze interactions between code regions that convey a semantic meaning for the researcher, e.g., CommitRegions represent blocks of code that belongs to the same commit. Our tool suite allows the researcher to automatically run analyses provided by VaRA on different software projects. For this, we provides different preconfigured experiments and projects. Experiments abstract the actions that should be taken when analyzing a project, e.g., build, analyze, generate result graph. Projects describe how a software project should be configured and build, e.g., gzip provides all necessary information to checkout, configure, and compile the project.

Setup Tool Suite

Install dependencies

To use the VaRA Tool Suite, make sure you have the necessary packages installed. For ubuntu, you can use the following command to install them (your system has to have at least python3.6):

sudo apt install python3-dev python3-tk python3-psutil psutils ninja-build python3-pip autoconf cmake ruby curl time libyaml-dev git
sudo apt install python3-venv # If you want to install VaRA-TS in a python virtualenv

Installation from PyPI

pip3 install varats

Installation from source

Additional packages are required to build VaRA from source.

sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libboost-all-dev libpapi-dev googletest libxml2-dev

The easiest way to install VaRA is to use the vara-buildsetup tool. You can find more information about this tool in its documentation.

Running experiments and analyzing projects

VaRA-TS provides different preconfigured experiments and projects. In order to execute an experiment on a project we use BenchBuild, an empirical-research toolkit.

Setup: Configuring BenchBuild

First, we need to generate a folder with a configuration file for BenchBuild in the vara root directory, this is done with:

vara-gen-bbconfig

Running BenchBuild experiments

Second, we change into the benchbuild folder and run an experiment that generates CommitReports for provided projects, in this case we use gzip.

cd $VARA_ROOT/benchbuild
benchbuild -vv run -E GenerateCommitReport gzip

The generated result files are place in the vara/results/$PROJECT_NAME folder and can be further visualized with VaRA-TS graph generators.

Using CaseStudy and paper configs

Reproducing results for different projects and experiments is important. To help with reproducing results, VaRA-TS proposes the concept of a CaseStudy and paper configs. Each case study specifies which revision of a project needs to be analyzed. Paper configs then group together a set of case studies that belong to the same paper, allowing the user to precisly specify which revisions of what project need to be analyzed to regenerate the results for a specific paper. For more information visit our documentation.

VaRA developer tools

VaRA-TS provides different tools to ease VaRA development.

vara-develop

vara-develop, short vd, is a helper to interact with the different VaRA project repositories when working on VaRA. The tool provides commands for showing git status, creating new-branch or checkout existing branches. Furthermore, commands to pull/push the current branches and to show currently developed feature branches f-branches. It can be used on a set of projects simultaneously. A command like:

> vd new-branch f-FooBar vara clang llvm

will create the branch f-FooBar on all three repositories.

Showing the current status of the listed projects can be done with:

> vd status clang vara
################################################################################
# Project: clang                                                               #
################################################################################
On branch vara-80-dev
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/vara-80-dev'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

################################################################################
# Project: VaRA                                                                #
################################################################################
On branch f-InstrumentationVerifier
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/f-InstrumentationVerifier'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

The checkout tool helps you to checkout the same branch on different projects, if one exists. Furthermore, it can easily switch all projects to vara-dev or vara by just typing:

vd checkout vara-dev

To get a full overview of the tool use vd -h and vd {sub_command} -h.

Extending the tool suite

VaRA-TS allows the user to extend it with different projects, experiments, and data representations.

BenchBuild Projects

VaRA-TS defines a set of projects that can be analyzed with benchbuild.

    benchbuild
    └── projects

BenchBuild Experiments

VaRA-TS defines a set of projects that can be analyzed with benchbuild.

    benchbuild
    └── experiments

Running tests

Running all python tests:

    python setup.py test

Running all test with coverage:

    python setup.py test --addopts "--cov=varats --cov-report term-missing"