Accelerating Build Dependency Error Detection via Virtual Build

Abstract

Build scripts play an important role in transforming the source code into executable artifacts. However, the development of build scripts is typically error-prone. As one kind of the most prevalent errors in build scripts, the dependency-related errors, including missing dependencies and redundant dependencies, draw the attention of many researchers. A variety of build dependency analysis techniques have been proposed to tackle them. Unfortunately, most of these techniques, even the state-of-the-art ones, suffer from efficiency issues due to the expensive cost of monitoring the complete build process to build dynamic dependencies. Especially for large-scale projects, such the cost would not be affordable.