Ranking co-change candidates of micro-clones
Pages 244 - 253
Abstract
Identical or nearly similar code fragments in a software system's code-base are known as code clones. Code clones from the same clone class have a tendency of co-changing (changing together) consistently during evolution. Focusing on this co-change tendency, existing studies have investigated prediction and ranking co-change candidates of regular clones. However, a recent study shows that micro-clones which are smaller than the minimum size threshold of regular clones might also need to be co-changed consistently during evolution. Thus, identifying and ranking co-change candidates of micro-clones is also important. In this paper, we investigate factors that influenc the co-change tendency of the co-change candidates of a target micro-clone fragment.
We mine fil level evolutionary coupling from thousands of revisions of our subject systems through mining association rules and analyze this coupling for the purpose of ranking. According to our finding on six open-source subject systems written in Java and C, consistent co-change tendency of micro-clones is influenc d by fil proximity of the micro-clone fragments as well as evolutionary coupling of the file containing those micro-clone fragments. On the basis of our finding we propose a composite ranking mechanism by incorporating both fil proximity and file coupling for ranking co-change candidates for micro-clones and fin that our proposed mechanism performs significantl better than File Proximity Ranking mechanism. We believe that our proposed ranking mechanism has the potential to help programmers in updating micro-clones consistently with less effort
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November 2019
421 pages
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IBM Corp.
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Published: 04 November 2019
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