Software Components Compatibility Verification Based on Static Byte-Code Analysis

Current enterprise systems are widely implemented using statically typed languages such as Java. One of the reasons are strong type checks at compile time that help prevent runtime errors. The static type checks are also well integrated into current development tools. One of the less explored area are, however, static type checks of binary software components. Since current software usually contains a large amount of third-party components, the compilers can no longer cover the static type checks of the final product, especially the inter-dependencies of the components are out of their reach. In this work, we propose an approach that analyses the byte-code of Java classes to reconstruct the mutual dependencies of respective components first. Then, the dependencies are examined to find any type inconsistencies. As a result, this approach detects dependency problems early in the development phase and prevents undesirable run time product failures caused by them.