When Functions Change Their Names: Automatic Detection of Origin Relationships

It is a common understanding that identifying the same entity such as module, file, and function between revisions is important for software evolution related analysis. Most software evolution researchers use entity names, such as file names and function names, as entity identifiers based on the assumption that each entity is uniquely identifiable by its name. Unfortunately names change over time. In this paper we propose an automated algorithm that identifies entity mapping at the function level across revisions even when an entity’s name changes in the new revision. This algorithm is based on computing function similarities. We introduce eight similarity factors to determine if a function is renamed from a function. To find out which similarity factors are dominant, a significance analysis is performed on each factor. To validate our algorithm and for factor significance analysis, ten human judges manually identified renamed entities across revisions for two open source projects: ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Sunghun Kim, Kai Pan, E. James Whitehead Jr.
• Keywords: Human Judges, Reverse Engineering, Similarity Factors, Software Evolution, WCRE 2005