Speaker:	Miryung Kim , University of Texas, Austin
When:	2008-11-17 10:00
Place:	Room 308, Bldg 302, SNU

Abstract

There is a significant gap between how programmers think about code changes and how change is represented in most change-centric software engineering tools such as diff, CVS, and Unix patch. To bridge this gap, I developed a new program differencing approach that automatically extracts high-level change descriptions from two program versions. The core of this approach is a novel rule-based change representation that explicitly and concisely captures systematic changes to a program's structure and a rule learning algorithm that automatically infers such rules. In this talk, I will also present my empirical studies on duplicated code, which partially motivated my program differencing approach. It has been long believed that code clones---syntactically similar code fragments---indicate bad smells of poor software design and that refactoring code clones improves software quality. By analyzing how code clones actually change over time, I found that code clones are not inherently bad and that immediate and aggressive refactoring may not be the best solution for managing code clones.

Short bio

Miryung Kim received Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. David Notkin at the University of Washington in Seattle. She will be joining the University of Texas, Austin as an assistant professor from January 2009. She graduated as the top of all undergraduate students in Korea Advanced Institute of Science Technology and received an award from the Secretary of Ministry of Science and Technology of Korea in 2001. She earned her master's degree at the University of Washington in 2003. Her current research interests are software evolution, mining software repositories, and human aspects of software development.

Resources

• talk slide