Automated Grouping of Editing Operations of Source Code

Abstract

In software configuration management, it is important to separate source code changes into meaningful units before committing them (in short, Task Level Commit). However, developers often commit unrelated code changes in a single transaction. To support Task Level Commit, an existing technique uses an editing history of source code and enables developers to group the editing operations in the history. This paper proposes an automated technique for grouping editing operations in a history based on several criteria including source files, classes, methods, comments, and times editted. We show how our technique reduces developers' separating cost compared with the manual approach.