Coming: a Tool for Mining Change Pattern Instances from Git Commits

TL;DR

Coming is an open-source tool that mines instances of change patterns from Git commits, helping researchers analyze software evolution by detecting specific code change patterns across revisions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel tool that automatically detects and reports change pattern instances in Git repositories, filling a gap in existing software evolution analysis tools.

Findings

Successfully detected change pattern instances in 28 revision pairs.

Identified change patterns involving If conditions in 26 cases.

Provides frequency analysis of code changes across commits.

Abstract

Software repositories such as Git have become a relevant source of information for software engineer researcher. For instance, the detection of Commits that fulfill a given criterion (e.g., bugfixing commits) is one of the most frequent tasks done to understand the software evolution. However, to our knowledge, there is not open-source tools that, given a Git repository, returns all the instances of a given change pattern. In this paper we present Coming, a tool that takes an input a Git repository and mines instances of change patterns on each commit. For that, Coming computes fine-grained changes between two consecutive revisions, analyzes those changes to detect if they correspond to an instance of a change pattern (specified by the user using XML), and finally, after analyzing all the commits, it presents a) the frequency of code changes and b) the instances found on each commit. We evaluate Coming on a set of 28 pairs of revisions from Defects4J, finding instances of change patterns that involve If conditions on 26 of them.