Documenting Database Usages and Schema Constraints in Database-Centric Applications
This web page is a companion to our ICSE 2015 paper submission entitled "Documenting Database Usages and Schema Constraints in Database-Centric Applications".
1. What is DBScribe?
We present a novel approach, namely DBScribe, for automatic generation of natural language descriptions at method-level. DBScribe statically analyzes the source code and the database schema to detect database usages, and propagates the usages and schema constraints through the call graph to document local and delegated execution of SQL queries/statements.
The following diagram depicts the DBScribe components:
2. User Study - DBScribe
Questions
Q1. Completeness: Only focusing on the content of the description and without considering the way it has been presented, do you think the description is complete?
- A1. The description does not miss any important information.
- A2. The description misses some important information to understand the database-related operations.
- A3. The description misses most important information to understand the database-related operations.
Q2. Conciseness: Only focusing on the content of the description and without considering the way it has been presented, do you think the description is concise?
- A1. The description contains no redundant/useless information.
- A2. The description contains some redundant/useless information.
- A3. The description contains a lot of redundant/useless information.
Q3. Expressiveness: Only focusing on the content of the description and without considering the completeness and conciseness, do you think the description is expressive?
- A1. The description is easy to read.
- A2. The description is somewhat readable and and understandable.
- A3. The description is hard to read and understand.
Q4. Is this type of description useful for understanding the database usages in the system? (Open question)
Q5. What software engineering tasks will you use this type of description for? (Open question)
Results
| Completeness (Q1) | Conciseness (Q2) | Expressiveness (Q3) | |||||||
| A1 | A2 | A3 | A1 | A2 | A3 | A1 | A2 | A3 | |
| UMAS | 71 | 18 | 1 | 52 | 36 | 2 | 64 | 24 | 2 |
| Riskit | 61 | 24 | 5 | 60 | 21 | 9 | 61 | 21 | 8 |
| Openemm | 24 | 14 | 4 | 38 | 2 | 2 | 37 | 4 | 1 |
| Xinco | 25 | 20 | 3 | 40 | 8 | 0 | 42 | 6 | 0 |
| Fina | 24 | 15 | 3 | 31 | 10 | 1 | 37 | 5 | 0 |
| Total | 205 | 91 | 16 | 221 | 77 | 14 | 241 | 60 | 11 |
| Total (in %) | 65.71% | 29.17% | 5.13% | 70.83% | 24.68% | 4.5% | 77.24% | 19.23% | 3.53% |
* Complete reports of the user study generated by Qualtrics are available here
3. DBScribe Descriptions and DCAs data
- Subject applications are available at here. The bundles contain source code, schema scripts for MySQL, schema diagram, and schema model in MySQL Workbench format.
- The descriptions in HTML version for the systems are in the following links: UMAS, RiskIT, OpenEmm, Xinco, Fina
*Authors
- Mario Linares-Vásquez
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: mlinarev at cs dot wm dot edu - Boyang Li
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: boyang at cs dot wm dot edu - Christopher Vendome
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA.
E-mail: cvendome at cs dot wm dot edu - Denys Poshyvanyk
- The College of William and Mary, VA, USA
E-mail: denys at cs dot wm dot edu