14:15h - 15:45h

Raum 057, Oet. 67

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Anna Biebl: Detecting and Tracking Cross-Language Identifiers through History Mining

Masterarbeit, betreut von Philip Mayer

Today's software applications are often written in multiple programming languages. Components of the software might be linked to others via identifiers sharing the same name. If these components are written in distinct languages these identifiers are called Cross-Language Identifiers (XLIs). The aim of this thesis is to present a generic and language independent approach to detect and track XLIs. XLIs are detected with the help of the version control system Git by finding identical identifiers which simultaneously changed in multiple languages within the Git history. To make XLIs accessible to current development efforts, as they might be detected in an old version, their position needs to be tracked along the Git history to the latest version. In order to check how well the approaches for XLI detection and tracking work the developed algorithms have been evaluated on a diverse set of 1150 open source software projects. The results provide evidence that the approaches for XLI detection and tracking are applicable and thus the algorithms should be integrated in development tools like Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) to improve the support for developing applications written in multiple languages.