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Querying distilled code changes to extract executable transformations

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Abstract

Change distilling algorithms compute a sequence of fine-grained changes that, when executed in order, transform a given source AST into a given target AST. The resulting change sequences are used in the field of mining software repositories to study source code evolution. Unfortunately, detecting and specifying source code evolutions in such a change sequence is cumbersome. We therefore introduce a tool-supported approach that identifies minimal executable subsequences in a sequence of distilled changes that implement a particular evolution pattern, specified in terms of intermediate states of the AST that undergoes each change. This enables users to describe the effect of multiple changes, irrespective of their execution order, while ensuring that different change sequences that implement the same code evolution are recalled. Correspondingly, our evaluation is two-fold. We show that our approach is able to recall different implementation variants of the same source code evolution in histories of different software projects. We also evaluate the expressiveness and ease-of-use of our approach in a user study.

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Notes

  1. These are variables only visible in the body of in-current-es. If these variables need to be available in other parts of the query a user needs to explicitly bind them to a logic variable.

  2. Throughout this paper, logic variables are prefixed with a question mark.

  3. https://ant.apache.org/

  4. https://github.com/ReinoutStevens/ChangeNodes

  5. http://web.cs.ucla.edu/~miryung/inspected_dataset.zip

  6. http://multiview.cs.pdx.edu/refactoring/experiments/

  7. Keep in mind that the approach currently only looks for minimal, executable solutions. As illustrated in Fig. 17, the approach disregards whether or not a distilled change sequence is realistic, i.e. a sequence that a developer might intuitively consider to transform one piece of code into another.

  8. All material that was provided in the user study, including the study’s complete results, are available online: http://soft.vub.ac.be/~tmoldere/qwalkeko

  9. Based on the org.eclipse.jdt.astview plugin

  10. This refers to the API documentation for all classes in the org.eclipse.jdt.core.dom package.

  11. This paper uses Tukey box plots (Frigge et al. 1989), the default type of box plots produced by the R language.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants of our user study. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed reading of this manuscript and their high-quality feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maxflow BVBA, Leuven, Belgium

    Reinout Stevens

  2. Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Ixelles, Belgium

    Tim Molderez & Coen De Roover

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  1. Reinout Stevens
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  2. Tim Molderez
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  3. Coen De Roover
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Correspondence to Tim Molderez.

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Communicated by: Gabriele Bavota and Andrian Marcus

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Stevens, R., Molderez, T. & De Roover, C. Querying distilled code changes to extract executable transformations. Empir Software Eng 24, 491–535 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9644-3

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