Search-based refactoring detection
Proceedings of the 15th annual conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Improving feature location practice with multi-faceted interactive exploration
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
Coevolution of variability models and related artifacts: a case study from the Linux kernel
Proceedings of the 17th International Software Product Line Conference
Identifying clone removal opportunities based on co-evolution analysis
Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
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Programmers often need to reason about how a program evolved between two or more program versions. Reasoning about program changes is challenging as there is a significant gap between how programmers think about changes and how existing program differencing tools represent such changes. For example, even though modification of a locking protocol is conceptually simple and systematic at a code level, diff extracts scattered text additions and deletions per file. To enable programmers to reason about program differences at a high level, this paper proposes a rule-based program differencing approach that automatically discovers and represents systematic changes as logic rules. To demonstrate the viability of this approach, we instantiated this approach at two different abstraction levels in Java: first at the level of application programming interface (API) names and signatures, and second at the level of code elements (e.g., types, methods, and fields) and structural dependences (e.g., method-calls, field-accesses, and subtyping relationships). The benefit of this approach is demonstrated through its application to several open source projects as well as a focus group study with professional software engineers from a large e-commerce company.