一句话：提出 DCLINK，通过追溯链接分析将数据约束变更定位到需修改的代码方法，并在蚂蚁集团真实变更中验证。
金融科技系统由大量与数据库交互的应用组成，常通过数据约束在运行时校验数据一致性。但数据约束随业务需求不断演化，而开发者难以及时跟进，且缺乏从约束变更到代码的映射，导致沟通负担和更新延迟。本文首先对金融科技系统中的数据约束开展实证研究，分析其演化方式及对开发流程的影响；受代码更新需响应约束变更的发现启发，提出 DCLINK，一种追溯链接分析技术，将每个数据约束变更关联到需要修改的目标方法。作者在蚂蚁集团的真实变更案例上进行了广泛评估，结果表明 DCLINK 能有效且高效地定位目标方法。
A FinTech system is a cluster of FinTech applications that intensively interact with databases containing a large quantity of user data. To ensure data consistency, it is a common practice to specify data constraints to validate data at runtime. However, data constraints often evolve according to changes in business requirements. Meanwhile, the developers can hardly keep up with the latest requirements during the development cycle. Such an information barrier increases the communication burden and prevents FinTech applications from being updated in time, impeding the development cycle significantly. In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical study on data constraints in FinTech systems, investigating how they evolve and affect the development process. Our results show that developers find it hard to update their code timely because no mapping from data constraint changes to code is provided. Inspired by the findings from code updates respecting data constraint changes, we propose DCLINK, a traceability link analysis for linking each data constraint change to target methods demanding the code update in the FinTech application. We extensively evaluate DCLINK upon real-world change cases in Ant Group. The results show that DCLINK can effectively and efficiently localize the target methods.
@inproceedings{TangWYWFFZ23,
title = {DCLINK: Bridging Data Constraint Changes and Implementations in FinTech Systems},
author = {Wensheng Tange and Chengpeng Wang and Peisen Yao and Rongxin Wu and Xianjin Fu and Gang Fan and Charles Zhang},
booktitle = {ASE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/ase56229.2023.00170}
}