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Empirical Software Engineering

, Volume 24, Issue 1, pp 491–535 | Cite as

Querying distilled code changes to extract executable transformations

  • Reinout Stevens
  • Tim MolderezEmail author
  • Coen De Roover
Article
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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.

Keywords

Change distilling Change querying Logic meta-programming 
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Notes

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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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Reinout Stevens
    • 1
  • Tim Molderez
    • 2
    Email author
  • Coen De Roover
    • 2
  1. 1.Maxflow BVBALeuvenBelgium
  2. 2.Software Languages LabVrije Universiteit BrusselIxellesBelgium

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