View article

Identifying repetitive code changes benefits developers, tool builders, and researchers. Tool builders can automate the popular code changes, thus improving the productivity of developers. Researchers can better understand the practice of code evolution, advancing existing code assistance tools and benefiting developers even further. Unfortunately, existing research either predominantly uses coarse-grained Version Control System (VCS) snapshots as the primary source of code evolution data or considers only a small subset of program transformations of a single kind - refactorings.

We present the first approach that identifies previously unknown frequent code change patterns from a fine-grained sequence of code changes. Our novel algorithm effectively handles challenges that distinguish continuous code change pattern mining from the existing data mining techniques. We evaluated our algorithm on 1,520 …