Using origin analysis to detect merging and splitting of source code entities

Merging and splitting source code entities is a common activity during the lifespan of a software system; as developers rethink the essential structure of a system or plan for a new evolutionary direction, so must they be able to reorganize the design artifacts at various abstraction levels as seems...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on software engineering 2005-02, Vol.31 (2), p.166-181
Main Authors: Godfrey, M.W., Zou, L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
and reengineering
Case studies
Data base management systems
Database systems
Design engineering
Developers
Documentation
Environmental management
History
Index Terms- Software evolution
Information analysis
Merging
origin analysis
Origins
restructuring
Reverse engineering
Software
Software engineering
Software maintenance
Software systems
Software tools
Splitting
Studies
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Summary:Merging and splitting source code entities is a common activity during the lifespan of a software system; as developers rethink the essential structure of a system or plan for a new evolutionary direction, so must they be able to reorganize the design artifacts at various abstraction levels as seems appropriate. However, while the raw effects of such changes may be plainly evident in the new artifacts, the original context of the design changes is often lost. That is, it may be obvious which characters of which files have changed, but it may not be obvious where or why moving, renaming, merging, and/or splitting of design elements has occurred. In this paper, we discuss how we have extended origin analysis (Q. Tu et al., 2002), (M.W. Godfrey et al., 2002) to aid in the detection of merging and splitting of files and functions in procedural code; in particular, we show how reasoning about how call relationships have changed can aid a developer in locating where merges and splits have occurred, thereby helping to recover some information about the context of the design change. We also describe a case study of these techniques (as implemented in the Beagle tool) using the PostgreSQL database system as the subject.
ISSN:0098-5589
1939-3520
DOI:10.1109/TSE.2005.28