Investigating and Recommending Co-Changed Entities for JavaScript Programs

JavaScript (JS) is one of the most popular programming languages due to its flexibility and versatility, but debugging JS code is tedious and error-prone. In our research, we conducted an empirical study to characterize the relationship between co-changed software entities (e.g., functions and variables), and built a machine learning (ML)-based approach to recommend additional entity to edit given developers’ code changes. Specifically, we first crawled 14,747 commits in 10 open-source projects; for each commit, we created one or more change dependency graphs (CDGs) to model the referencer-referencee relationship between co-changed entities. Next, we extracted the common subgraphs between CDGs to locate recurring co-change patterns between entities. Finally, based on those patterns, we extracted code features from co-changed entities and trained an ML model that recommends entities-to-change given a program commit. According to our empirical investigation, (1) 50% of the crawled commits involve multi-entity edits (i.e., edits that touch multiple entities simultaneously); (2) three recurring patterns commonly exist in all projects; and (3) 80–90% of co-changed function pairs either invoke the same function(s), access the same variable(s), or contain similar statement(s); and (4) our ML-based approach CoRec recommended entity changes with high accuracy. This research will improve programmer productivity and software quality.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Software Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Department of Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Jiang, Zijian

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Meng, Na

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Butt, Ali R.
• Servant Cortes, Francisco Javier

• Multi-entity edit
• change suggestion
• Machine learning
• JavaScript

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/101102

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/101102