Hidden dependencies in software systems

In this paper, we study the hidden dependencies that are a special kind of data flows. They play an important role in software maintenance and evolution because they propagate changes among the classes and they are hard to detect. We propose a technique that finds hidden dependencies through the computation of an “execute completely after” relation that is filtered using dynamically generated preconditions and postconditions. We show that these hidden dependencies exist even in well-structured software, like the open source programs JUnit, Drawlets, and Apache FtpServer. We also discuss the precision of this technique.