research-article

Why did this code change?

Authors:

Gail C. MurphyAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 1193 - 1196

Published: 18 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

When a developer works on code that is shared with other developers, she needs to know why the code has been changed in particular ways to avoid reintroducing bugs. A developer looking at a code change may have access to a short commit message or a link to a bug report which may provide detailed information about how the code changed but which often lacks information about what motivated the change. This motivational information can sometimes be found by piecing together information from a set of relevant project documents, but few developers have the time to find and read the right documentation. We propose the use of multi-document summarization techniques to generate a concise natural language description of why code changed so that a developer can choose the right course of action.

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4 www.eclipse.org/mylyn, verified 12/12/12

Cited By

Pan RLe VNagappan NGulwani SLahiri SKaufman M(2021)Can Program Synthesis be Used to Learn Merge Conflict Resolutions?Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00077(785-796)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00077
Safwan KServant FDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Decomposing the rationale of code commits: the software developer’s perspectiveProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338979(397-408)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338979
Huang KChen BPeng XZhou DWang YLiu YZhao WHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)ClDiff: generating concise linked code differencesProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3238219(679-690)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3238219
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Why did this code change?
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software version control
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2013

1561 pages

ISBN:9781467330763

General Chair:
David Notkin,
Program Chairs:
Betty H. C. Cheng,
Klaus Pohl

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 18 May 2013

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ICSE '13

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SIGSOFT

ICSE '13: 35th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 18 - 26, 2013

CA, San Francisco, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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Citations

Cited By

Pan RLe VNagappan NGulwani SLahiri SKaufman M(2021)Can Program Synthesis be Used to Learn Merge Conflict Resolutions?Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00077(785-796)Online publication date: 22-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00077
Safwan KServant FDumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Decomposing the rationale of code commits: the software developer’s perspectiveProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3338979(397-408)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3338979
Huang KChen BPeng XZhou DWang YLiu YZhao WHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)ClDiff: generating concise linked code differencesProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3238219(679-690)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3238219
Liu ZXia XHassan ALo DXing ZWang XHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)Neural-machine-translation-based commit message generation: how far are we?Proceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3238190(373-384)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3238190
Kleebaum AJohanssen JPaech BAlkadhi RBruegge BBosch JFitzgerald BGoedicke MOlsson HKonersmann MKrusche S(2018)Decision knowledge triggers in continuous software engineeringProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering10.1145/3194760.3194765(23-26)Online publication date: 29-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3194760.3194765
Jiang SArmaly AMcMillan CRosu GDi Penta MNguyen T(2017)Automatically generating commit messages from diffs using neural machine translationProceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.5555/3155562.3155583(135-146)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3155562.3155583
Moreno LBavota GPenta MOliveto RMarcus ACanfora G(2017)ARENAIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2016.259153643:2(106-127)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2016.2591536
Zampetti FPonzanelli LBavota GMocci ADi Penta MLanza MScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)How developers document pull requests with external referencesProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.30(23-33)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.30
Jiang SMcMillan CScanniello GLo DSerebrenik A(2017)Towards automatic generation of short summaries of commitsProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2017.12(320-323)Online publication date: 20-May-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2017.12
Huang YZheng QChen XXiong YLiu ZLuo XBener ATurhan BBiffl S(2017)Mining version control system for automatically generating commit commentProceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1109/ESEM.2017.56(414-423)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ESEM.2017.56
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