Build system analysis with link prediction

Compilation is an important step in building working software system. To compile large systems, typically build systems, such as make, are used. In this paper, we investigate a new research problem for build configuration file (e.g., Makefile) analysis: how to predict missed dependencies in a build configuration file. We refer to this problem as dependency mining. Based on a Makefile, we build a dependency graph capturing various relationships defined in the Makefile. By representing a Makefile as a dependency graph, we map the dependency mining problem to a link prediction problem, and leverage 9 state-of-the-art link prediction algorithms to solve it. We collected Makefiles from 7 open source projects to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms.