Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: Syntactic Differencing Infrastructure for Software Evolution Research

拟议的新软件基础设施srcDiff(源代码DIFFerencer)汇集了鲍林格林州立大学和肯特州立大学的研究人员，将直接支持对软件如何随时间变化和发展的研究。该基础设施的核心是高度可伸缩的语法差异算法，该算法模拟程序员对软件更改的观点。该基础结构还支持查询和探索更改，并用于确定哪种编程语言的语法结构在两个源代码版本之间发生了更改。当前的差异方法不理解所使用的编程语言的语法。因此，srcDiff产生了更准确、更容易理解的变化差异。该方法具有很强的可扩展性，可以应用于大型软件系统。准确地分析软件变更对于研究大型关键软件系统是如何演化的至关重要。SrcDiff提供了一种以高效和可伸缩的方式产生精确差异的方法。建议的基础设施将极大地减轻研究人员和从业者在获取、分析和处理软件变更时产生的负担。对软件的更改直接或间接用于各种任务，包括软件合并、克隆检测、作者归属、错误定位、功能定位、推荐系统、提交分类等。有几种差异工具，但没有其他语法差异方法可用于准确、可伸缩、无损并支持结果分析的源代码。目前，研究人员或实践者还没有可用的句法差异基础设施。变更是软件开发中不可或缺的一部分。软件开发人员的日常活动需要有关更改的知识。SrcDiff将降低执行各种类型研究的成本，并为开发各种类型的工具提供一个平台，以直接帮助软件开发人员。作为日常开发任务的一部分，开发人员需要检查最近和过去的更改、执行代码审查、合并分支和调试软件。软件项目经理需要做出明智的决策，这些决策需要了解对其系统的更改，例如更改影响分析。拟议的基础设施有可能对所有类型的软件产生积极影响并提高其质量。SrcDiff基础设施吸引了各种利益相关者，包括研究人员、学生和软件从业者。srcDiff项目网站是www.srcDiff.org。基础设施是免费的，该站点包括srcDiff工具的下载、文档、教程和指向开放源码系统的存储库的链接。该网站将至少维护到2030年。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The proposed new software infrastructure, srcDiff (SouRce Code DIFFerencer), which brings together investigators from Bowling Green State University and Kent State University, will directly support research on how software changes and evolves over time. The core of the infrastructure is a highly scalable syntactic differencing algorithm that models a programmer’s viewpoint of software change. The infrastructure also supports querying and exploration of changes and is used to determine which programming language syntactic structures change between two source code versions. Current differencing approaches have no understanding of the syntax of the programming language being used. Thus, srcDiff produces a more accurate and human-understandable difference of changes. The approach is very scalable and can be applied to large software systems.Accurately analyzing changes to software is vital for studying how large critical software systems evolve. srcDiff provides a means to produce accurate differences in an efficient and scalable manner. The proposed infrastructure will greatly reduce the burden researchers and practitioners incur in obtaining, analyzing, and processing software changes. Changes to software are used directly or indirectly for a wide variety of tasks including software merging, clone detection, author attribution, bug localization, feature location, recommender systems, commit classification, and much more. Several tools for differencing exist, but there is no other syntactic differencing approach for source code that is accurate, scalable, lossless, and supports analysis of the results. Currently, no usable syntactic differencing infrastructure is widely available to researchers or practitioners.Change is an integral part of software development. Knowledge about changes is required for the day-to-day activities of software developers. srcDiff will reduce the cost to perform various types of research and enable a platform for the development of various types of tools to directly aid software developers. As part of their daily development tasks, developers need to inspect recent and past changes, perform code reviews, merge branches, and debug software. Software project managers need to make informed decisions that require knowledge of changes to their systems, such as change impact analysis. The proposed infrastructure has the potential to positively impact and improve the quality of all types of software. The srcDiff infrastructure appeals to a variety of stakeholders, including researchers, students, and software practitioners.The srcDiff project website is at www.srcDiff.org. The infrastructure is freely available, and the site includes downloads of the srcDiff tools, documentation, tutorials, and links to the repository of the open-source system. This site will be maintained until at least 2030.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.