A comprehensive and scalable method for analyzing fine-grained source code change patterns

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive method for identifying fine-grained change patterns in the source code of large-scale software projects. Source code changes are computed by differencing abstract syntax trees of adjacent versions and transferred to a set of logical statements called a factbase. A factbase contains information for tracking and relating source code entities across versions and can be used to integrate analysis results of other tools such as call graphs and control flows. Users can obtain a list of change pattern instances by querying the factbase. Experiments conducted on the Linux-2.6 kernel, which involve more than 4 billions of facts, are reported to demonstrate capability of the method.