Improving pattern tracking with a language-aware tree differencing algorithm

International audienceTracking code fragments of interest is important in monitoring a software project over multiple versions. Various approaches, including our previous work on Herodotos, exploit the notion of Longest Common Subsequence, as computed by readily available tools such as GNU Diff, to map corresponding code fragments. Nevertheless, the efficient code differencing algorithms are typically line-based or word-based, and thus do not report changes at the level of language constructs. Furthermore, they identify only additions and removals, but not the moving of a block of code from one part of a file to another. Code fragments of interest that fall within the added and removed regions of code have to be manually correlated across versions, which is tedious and error-prone. When studying a very large code base over a long time, the number of manual correlations can become an obstacle to the success of a study. In this paper, we investigate the effect of replacing the current line-based algorithm used by Herodotos by tree-matching, as provided by the algorithm of the differencing tool GumTree. In contrast to the line-based approach, the tree-based approach does not generate any manual correlations, but it incurs a high execution time. To address the problem, we propose a hybrid strategy that gives the best of both approaches

A study of code change patterns for adaptive maintenance with AST analysis

Example-based transformational approaches to automate adaptive maintenance changes plays an important role in software research. One primary concern of those approaches is that a set of good qualified real examples of adaptive changes previously made in the history must be identified, or otherwise the adoption of such approaches will be put in question. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough detail to clearly direct transformation rule developers to overcome the barrier of finding qualified examples for adaptive changes. This work explores the histories of several open source systems to study the repetitiveness of adaptive changes in software evolution, and hence recognizing the source code change patterns that are strongly related with the adaptive maintenance. We collected the adaptive commits from the history of numerous open source systems, then we obtained the repetitiveness frequencies of source code changes based on the analysis of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) edit actions within an adaptive commit. Using the prevalence of the most common adaptive changes, we suggested a set of change patterns that seem correlated with adaptive maintenance. It is observed that 76.93% of the undertaken adaptive changes were represented by 12 AST code differences. Moreover, only 9 change patterns covered 64.69% to 76.58% of the total adaptive change hunks in the examined projects. The most common individual patterns are related to initializing objects and method calls changes. A correlation analysis on examined projects shows that they have very similar frequencies of the patterns correlated with adaptive changes. The observed repeated adaptive changes could be useful examples for the construction of transformation approache