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Search-Based Generalization and Refinement of Code Templates

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Book cover Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9962))

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Abstract

Several tools support code templates as a means to specify searches within a program’s source code. Despite their ubiquity, code templates can often prove difficult to specify, and may produce too many or too few match results. In this paper, we present a search-based approach to support developers in specifying templates. This approach uses a suite of mutation operators to recommend changes to a given template, such that it matches with a desired set of code snippets. We evaluate our approach on the problem of inferring a code template that matches all instances of a design pattern, given one instance as a starting template.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Ekeko/X program transformation tool and the extensions presented in this paper are available at: https://github.com/cderoove/damp.ekeko.snippets.

  2. 2.

    Experiment data and instructions to reproduce the experiment are available at the Ekeko/X website: https://github.com/cderoove/damp.ekeko.snippets.

  3. 3.

    If a method is removed, match|set is always added so the template still matches.

  4. 4.

    The system used in the experiment has 16GB RAM and an Intel Core i7 (Haswell).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Languages Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Tim Molderez & Coen De Roover

Authors
  1. Tim Molderez
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  2. Coen De Roover
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tim Molderez or Coen De Roover .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Federica Sarro

  2. Michigan State University , East Lansing, Michigan, USA

    Kalyanmoy Deb

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Molderez, T., De Roover, C. (2016). Search-Based Generalization and Refinement of Code Templates. In: Sarro, F., Deb, K. (eds) Search Based Software Engineering. SSBSE 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9962. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47106-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47106-8_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47105-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47106-8

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