Patent ID: 9424025
Filing Date: 2016-08-23
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A method of determining backward compatibility of a software component, the method comprising: identifying, by a processor, one or more programming interfaces that are exposed by a first version of a software component; converting, by the processor, attributes of exposed programming interfaces into corresponding operations, wherein attributes of the exposed programming interfaces are converted into corresponding operations such that a flag is added to a converted attribute indicating whether the attribute is an optional or a mandatory attribute; generating, by the processor, respective tree structures for both a first version of a software component and a second version of a software component based, at least in part, on one or both of (i) a programming language of the version of the software component being represented by that tree structure and (ii) a parameter of an operation that can be used internally by that operation to return an output value being included in the tree structure as a return node of that operation; adding, by the processor, respective identified returns and faults to respective tree structures of the first version of a software component and the second version of the software component; performing, by the processor, a backward compatibility check by comparing the operations of the first version of the software component to one or more operations of the second version of the software component; and determining, by the processor, a backward compatibility of the first version of the software component, based, at least in part, on a result of the backward compatibility check.