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

提议的新软件基础设施srcDiff（源代码差异器）汇集了鲍灵格林州立大学和肯特州立大学的研究人员，将直接支持软件如何随时间变化和发展的研究。基础设施的核心是一个高度可伸缩的语法差异算法，它模拟了程序员对软件更改的看法。该基础结构还支持查询和探索更改，并用于确定在两个源代码版本之间哪些编程语言语法结构发生了变化。当前的差分方法不理解所使用的编程语言的语法。因此，srcDiff产生了更准确和人类可以理解的变化差异。该方法具有很强的可扩展性，可以应用于大型软件系统。准确地分析软件的变化对于研究大型关键软件系统的演变是至关重要的。srcDiff提供了一种以高效和可扩展的方式产生准确差异的方法。所提出的基础结构将极大地减轻研究人员和实践者在获取、分析和处理软件变更方面的负担。对软件的更改直接或间接用于各种各样的任务，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、提交分类等等。存在一些用于区分的工具，但是对于源代码，没有其他的语法区分方法是准确的、可伸缩的、无损的，并且支持对结果的分析。目前，研究人员或实践者还没有广泛可用的语法差异基础结构。变更是软件开发中不可分割的一部分。软件开发人员的日常活动需要有关变更的知识。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定，这些决定需要了解系统的变化，比如变化影响分析。所建议的基础结构具有积极影响和提高所有类型软件质量的潜力。srcDiff基础设施吸引了各种各样的涉众，包括研究人员、学生和软件从业者。srcDiff项目的网站是www.srcDiff.org。基础设施是免费提供的，该站点包括srcDiff工具、文档、教程的下载，以及到开源系统存储库的链接。该站点将至少维持到2030年。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.