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Yu, Yijun; Tun, Thein and
(2011).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2011.6100063
Abstract
Software developers are often interested in particular changes in programs that are relevant to their current tasks: not all changes to evolving software are equally important. However, most existing differencing tools, such as diff, notify developers of more changes than they wish to see. In this paper, we propose a technique to specify and automatically detect only those changes in programs deemed meaningful, or relevant, to a particular development task. Using four elementary annotations on the grammar of any programming language, namely Ignore, Order, Prefer and Scope, developers can specify, with limited effort, the type of change they wish to detect. Our algorithms use these annotations to transform the input programs into a normalised form, and to remove clones across different normalised programs in order to detect non-trivial and relevant differences. We evaluate our tool on a benchmark of programs to demonstrate its improved precision compared to other differencing approaches.
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About
- Item ORO ID
- 29450
- Item Type
- Conference or Workshop Item
- ISSN
- 1938-4300
- Project Funding Details
-
Funded Project Name Project ID Funding Body FP7 Security Engineering of Lifelong Evolvable Systems (SecureChange) Not Set European Union SEIF 2011award Not Set Microsoft Software Engineering Innovative Foundation CSET2 programme Not Set Science Foundation Ireland - Keywords
- meaningful changes; relevance; programs; normalisation; clone removals; specifications; differencing
- Academic Unit or School
-
Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) > Computing and Communications
Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) - Research Group
- Centre for Research in Computing (CRC)
- Copyright Holders
- © 2011 IEEE, © 2011 ACM
- Related URLs
- Depositing User
- Yijun Yu