Incremental origin analysis of source code files

Abstract

The history of software systems tracked by version control systems is often incomplete because many file movements are not recorded. However, static code analyses that mine the file history, such as change frequency or code churn, produce precise results only if the complete history of a source code file is available. In this paper, we show that up to 38.9% of the files in open source systems have an incomplete history, and we propose an incremental, commit-based approach to reconstruct the history based on clone information and name similarity. With this approach, the history of a file can be reconstructed across repository boundaries and thus provides accurate information for any source code analysis. We evaluate the approach in terms of correctness, completeness, performance, and relevance with a case study among seven open source systems and a developer survey.

Research Artifact: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub

“…The method compares identifiers used in functions to identify original functions. Steidl et al [34] proposed to detect source code move, copy, and merge in a source code repository. The method identifies a similar file in a repository as a candidate of an original version.…”

Source File Set Search for Clone-and-Own Reuse Analysis

“…The method compares identifiers used in functions to identify original functions. Steidl et al [31] proposed to detect source code move, copy, and merge in a source code repository. The method identifies a similar file in a repository as a candidate of an original version.…”