Section: New Results

Recording and Replaying System-Specific Conventions.

In other situations, we found that developers sometimes perform sequences of code changes in a systematic way. These sequences consist of small code changes (e.g., create a class, then extract a method to this class), which are applied to groups of related code entities (e.g., some of the methods of a class). We propose to help this task by letting the developer record the sequence of code changes when he first applies it, and then generalize this sequence to apply it in other locations. The evaluation is based on real instances of such sequences that we found in different open source systems. We were able to replay 92% of the examples, which consisted in up to seven code entities modified up to 66 times. We are still working on the approach to allow for (semi-)automatic generalization of the recorded sequence of changes [71], [70].