An Initial Step Towards Organ Transplantation Based on GitHub Repository

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of 'organ transplantation' in software by extracting functional code segments from GitHub repositories, demonstrating successful reuse and integration across different programming languages.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to code reuse by extracting and transplanting functional code 'organs' from open-source repositories, validated through empirical analysis and practical transplantation.

Findings

Abundant practical organs found in commits with 'add' keyword

Most organs are easy-to-transplant, about 70%

Extracted organs show high performance in unit tests

Abstract

Organ transplantation, which is the utilization of codes directly related to some specific functionalities to complete ones own program, provides more convenience for developers than traditional component reuse. However, recent techniques are challenged with the lack of organs for transplantation. Hence, we conduct an empirical study on extracting organs from GitHub repository to explore transplantation based on large-scale dataset. We analyze statistics from 12 representative GitHub projects and get the conclusion that 1) there are abundant practical organs existing in commits with add as a key word in the comments; 2) organs in this repository mainly possess four kinds of contents; 3) approximately 70% of the organs are easy-to-transplant. Implementing our transplantation strategy for different kinds of organs, we manually extract 30 organs in three different programming languages, namely Java, Python, and C, and make unit tests for them utilizing four testing tools (two for Java, one for Python, and one for C). At last, we transplant three Java organs into a specific platform for a performance check to verify whether they can work well in the new system. All the 30 organs extracted by our strategy possess good performances in unit test with the highest passing rate reaching 97% and the lowest one still passing 80% and the three Java organs work well in the new system, providing three new functionalities for the host. All the results indicate the feasibility of organ transplantation based on open-source repository, bringing new idea for code reuse.