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Using evolutionary annotations from change logs to enhance program comprehension

Published: 22 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Evolutionary annotations are descriptions of how source code evolves over time. Typical source comments, given their static nature, are usually inadequate for describing how a program has evolved over time; instead, source code comments are typically a description of what a program currently does. We propose the use of evolutionary annotations as a way of describing the rationale behind changes applied to a given program (for example "These lines were added to ..."). Evolutionary annotations can assist a software developer in the understanding of how a given portion of source code works by showing him how the source has evolved into its current form.In this paper we describe a method to automatically create evolutionary annotations from change logs, defect tracking systems and mailing lists. We describe the design of a prototype for Eclipse that can filter and present these annotations alongside their corresponding source code and in workbench views. We use Apache as a test case to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

References

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D. M. German. Using software trails to reconstruct the evolution of software. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 16(6):367--384, 2004.
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  • (2013)Towards understanding software change request assignmentProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2460999.2461028(195-206)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2013

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cover image ACM Conferences
MSR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories
May 2006
191 pages
ISBN:1595933972
DOI:10.1145/1137983
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. annotations
  2. evolutionary
  3. mining software repositories
  4. software evolution
  5. version control

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  • (2013)Towards understanding software change request assignmentProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/2460999.2461028(195-206)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2013

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