Static discovery and remediation of code-embedded resource dependencies

Abstract

Many enterprises perform data-center transformation, consolidation, and migration in order to improve the efficiency of their IT infrastructures. These transformation projects begin with the discovery of the existing infrastructure, in particular the dependencies between applications. These dependencies are needed in planning, in order to determine how components influence one another, and in relinking, so that the component names and addresses can be updated. Typically, dependency discovery is done by network monitoring and middleware configuration analysis. These existing approaches will often fail to detect dependencies expressed in the application code. In this paper, we present the first method and tool for automatically identifying code-embedded external dependencies in Java Enterprise Edition applications. In addition, our tool can automatically alter the application code to update the dependencies, or externalize them to configuration files. We analyzed over 1000 Java EE applications from three enterprise environments. The results demonstrate the prevalence of code-embedded dependencies that would otherwise have to be identified manually, often causing failures during user-acceptance testing. © 2011 IEEE.