Software Evolution Comprehension: Replay to the Rescue

2011 IEEE 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension Pub Date : 2011-06-22 DOI:10.1109/ICPC.2011.39

Lile Hattori, Marco D'Ambros, Michele Lanza, M. Lungu

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引用次数: 35

Abstract

Developers often need to find answers to questions regarding the evolution of a system when working on its code base. While their information needs require data analysis spanning over different repository types, the source code repository has a pivotal role for program comprehension tasks. However, the coarse-grained nature of the data stored by commit-based software configuration management systems often makes it challenging for a developer to search for an answer. We present Replay, an Eclipse plug-in that allows one to explore the change history of a system by capturing the changes at a finer granularity level than commits, and by replaying the past changes chronologically inside the integrated development environment with the source code at hand. We conducted a controlled experiment to empirically assess whether Replay outperforms a baseline (SVN client in Eclipse) on helping developers to answer common questions related to software evolution. The experiment shows that Replay leads to a decrease in completion time with respect to a set of software evolution comprehension tasks.

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软件进化理解:重播拯救

开发人员在处理代码库时，经常需要找到有关系统演变的问题的答案。虽然他们的信息需求需要跨越不同存储库类型的数据分析，但源代码存储库对于程序理解任务具有关键作用。然而，基于提交的软件配置管理系统所存储的数据的粗粒度特性常常使开发人员很难找到答案。我们介绍了Replay，这是一个Eclipse插件，它允许用户通过在比提交更细的粒度级别捕获更改，以及在集成开发环境中使用手头的源代码按时间顺序重播过去的更改，来探索系统的更改历史。我们进行了一个控制实验，以经验评估Replay在帮助开发人员回答与软件发展相关的常见问题方面是否优于基线(Eclipse中的SVN客户机)。实验表明，对于一组软件进化理解任务，重放可以减少完成时间。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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2011 IEEE 19th International Conference on Program Comprehension

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