Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2017

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach to detecting project-specific recurring designs in code base and abstracting them into design templates as reuse opportunities. The mined templates allow programmers to make further customization for generating new code. The generated code involves the code skeleton of recurring design as well as the semi-implemented code bodies annotated with comments to remind programmers of necessary modification. We implemented our approach as an Eclipse plugin called MICoDe. We evaluated our approach with a reuse simulation experiment and a user study involving 16 participants. The results of our simulation experiment on 10 open source Java projects show that, to create a new similar feature with a design template, (1) on average 69% of the elements in the template can be reused and (2) on average 60% code of the new feature can be adopted from the template. Our user study further shows that, compared to the participants adopting the copy-paste-modify strategy, the ones using MICoDe are more effective to understand a big design picture and more efficient to accomplish the code reuse task.

Keywords

Open source software, Software engineering, design templates

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

ASE '17: Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering: October 30-November 3, Urbana-Champaign, IL

First Page

394

Last Page

404

ISBN

9781538626849

Identifier

10.1109/ASE.2017.8115652

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2017.8115652

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