Change impact analysis of multi-language and heterogeneously-licensed software

Today software systems are built with heterogeneous languages such as Java, C, C++, XML, Perl or Python just to name a few. This introduces new challenges both for the software analysis domain and program evolution as programmers must to cope with a variety of programming paradigms and languages. We believe that there is the need of global views supporting developers to effectively cope with complexity and to facilitate program comprehension and analysis of such heterogeneous systems. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of the systems is not limited to the language but also impacts the components licensing. In fact, licensing is another type of heterogeneity introduced by the large reuse of open source code. The heterogeneity of licenses also introduces challenges such how to legally combine components in different programming languages and licenses in the same system and how the change of the software can create a violation of licenses. In this context, we would like to develop a re-engineering tool for analysing change impact of heterogeneously licensed system considering multi-language environment. First, we want to study change impact analysis in multi-language system in general and extend it to support the issue of licenses.