SNEC: Semantic-based Non-Essential Change Detection

Introduction

We propose a novel technique SNEC, which identifies non-essential changes by observing semantic equivalence estimated by a semantic-aware static analyzer. Abundant non-essential changes in software history have negative impacts on software mining tasks such as co-change recommendation and defect prediction. Our technique can improve performance of mining tasks by filtering out non-essential changes effectively.

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Download

SNEC binary

• SNEC

SNEC needs following dependencies:

• Scala Library 2.9.1
• Choco Solver 2.1.2
• Soot Framework 2.4.0

When you experience any weird bug, try nightly versions of dependencies first. If the bug still remains after library updates, please report to authors.

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Quick Start

For comparing two versions of a.b.C class (located in rev1/a/b/C.class and rev2/a/b/C.class):

• Install JRE 1.6 or later, Scala 2.9.1 and download other dependencies
• Generate first summary dump:
scala -cp sootclasses-2.4.0.jar:choco-solver-2.1.2.jar SNEC.jar -cp rev1 a.b.C -summary_dump_file first.dump
• Generate second summary dump:
scala -cp sootclasses-2.4.0.jar:choco-solver-2.1.2.jar SNEC.jar -cp rev2 a.b.C -summary_dump_file second.dump
• Compare two summary files:
scala -cp sootclasses-2.4.0.jar:choco-solver-2.1.2.jar SNEC.jar -old_summary_file first.dump -new_summary_file second.dump -compare_by_name

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Experimental Results

All experimental results can be downloaded here. The file consists of three parts

• Non-essential change detection
• Application to co-change recommendation
• Application to defect prediction

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People

• Kihong Heo
• Heejong Lee
• Yungbum Jung
• DongGyun Han
• Sung Kim
• Kwangkeun Yi

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Last updated: Mar 6, 2013