Coming: A Tool for Mining Change Pattern Instances from Git Commits

Abstract

Software repositories such as Git have become a relevant source of information for software engineer researchers. For instance, the detection of commits that fulfill a given criterion (e.g., bugfixing commits) is one of the most frequent tasks done to understand the software evolution. However, to our knowledge, there is no open-source tool that, given a Git repository, returns all the instances of a given code change pattern. In this paper we present Coming, a tool that takes as input a Git repository and mines instances of code change patterns present on each commit. For that, Coming computes fine-grained code changes between two consecutive revisions, analyzes those changes to determine if they correspond to an instance of a change pattern (specified by the user using XML), and finally, after analyzing all the commits, it presents a) the frequency of code changes and b) the instances found in each commit. We evaluate Coming on a set of 28 pairs of revisions from Defects4J, finding instances of change patterns that involve If conditions on 26 of them.