Automatic Change Pattern Mining and Change Documentation

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Automatic Change Pattern Mining and Change Documentation"

By

Mr. Wenmao Gong


Abstract

As a software system evolves, developers make changes to add new features or 
fix different kinds of bugs reported by testers and end users. The efficiency 
and effectiveness of changing and fixing have huge impact on the reliability of 
the software system. After studying a large number of patches in major open 
source projects, we found that developers often make similar fix changes. There 
are some common change and fix types that are frequently used to fix certain 
kinds of program exceptions.

So we proposed a Graph based change pattern mining algorithm to automatically 
get change patterns from software revision changes. We found that a few 
frequent top change patterns covers large proportion of all changes and the 
rest change patterns distribute as a long tail. We also concluded several 
implications based on the mining results. Furthermore, we proposed some 
applications of our change pattern mining algorithm, and we did implementation 
and evaluation on one of the application -- automatic change documentation.


Date:			Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Time:			9:30am – 11:30am

Venue:			Room 4483
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo


**** ALL are Welcome ****