Multilingual Source Code Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review

• Main Authors: Zaigham Mushtaq, Ghulam Rasool, Balawal Shehzad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2017-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Software engineering; reverse engineering; software design; software architecture; software maintenance
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7953501/

Contemporary software applications are developed using cross-language artifacts, which are interdependent with each other. The source code analysis of these applications requires the extraction and examination of artifacts, which are build using multiple programming languages along with their dependencies. A large number of studies presented on multilingual source code analysis and its applications in the last one and half decade. The objective of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to summarize state of the art and prominent areas for future research. This SLR is based on different techniques, tools, and methodologies to analyze multilingual source code applications. We finalized 56 multi-discipline published papers relevant to multilingual source code analysis and its applications out of 3820 papers, filtered through multi-stage search criterion. Based on our findings, we highlight research gaps and challenges in the field of multilingual applications. The research findings are presented in the form of research problems, research contributions, challenges, and future prospects. We identified 46 research issues and requirements for analyzing multilingual applications and grouped them in 13 different software engineering domains. We examined the research contributions and mapped them with individual research problems. We presented the research contributions in the form of tools techniques and approaches that are presented in the form of research models, platforms, frameworks, prototype models, and case studies. Every research has its limitations or prospects for future research. We highlighted the limitations and future perspectives and grouped them in various software engineering domains. Most of the research trends and potential research areas are identified in static source code analysis, program comprehension, refactoring, reverse engineering, detection, and traceability of cross-language links, code coverage, security analysis, cross-language parsing, and abstraction of source code models.