Supporting Developers in Software Transplantation Using Dynamic Symbolic Execution

When developers work together on the code of a program, they may independently change different parts of that program at the same time. Usually each developer works in their own copy of the code, unaware of the exact changes the others are making. At some point in time, these different versions of the program have to be merged together again. This can lead to issues: conflicting changes in behaviour make the program not run or not run the way it is supposed to. Our research proposal aims to provide support to the developers before and after the merging to avoid these problems as much as possible. We want to create techniques and tools which will analyse the behaviour of different versions of the program and try to determine whether things may misbehave. In this way, the developer can take appropriate action beforehand or remediate afterwards.