Best Artefact Award at ICSME 2022 for Vadim Zaytsev, among others

The paper "Generating Customised Control Flow Graphs for Legacy Languages with Semi-Parsing", published earlier this year at ICSME 2022, one of the two top conferences in the field of software evolution, has received the Best Artefact Award. The paper is a collaboration of Vadim Zaytsev (an FMT member) and researchers from Université Catholique de Louvain (Céline Deknop and Kim Mens), as well as the industrial partner Raincode Labs (represented by Johan Fabry). The technical contribution of the paper was to apply semi-parsing, a technique mostly used to quickly collect approximate values of software metrics, to large codebases of COBOL code with embedded SQL queries, in order to extract control-flow graphs directly from the code, bypassing costly intermediate representations. The control-flow graphs helped migration engineers of Raincode to demonstrate behaviour preservation when refactoring large quantities of code of their customers. The work continues to expand to cover trace equivalence and other forms of advanced semantic diffing of software code. The artefact is available publicly: https://zenodo.org/record/6806075 More information about the ongoing project: https://grammarware.github.io/codediffng/