Code Comprehension and Review on Evolving Software: A Literature Survey

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Code Comprehension and Review on Evolving Software: A Literature Survey"

by

Miss Yida TAO


Abstract:

Software systems continuously change, during which new features are added, 
bugs are fixed, and code quality is improved. To ensure that a code change 
does not break the design and functionality of the software, developers 
usually review newly committed changes for quality assurance. Compared to 
formal code inspection that is typically labor-intensive and 
time-consuming, reviewing code changes is more frequent and lightweight. 
In fact, due to the evolving nature of software systems, such a 
lightweight practice is trending as the modern way of code review.

A fundamental step of code change review is the comprehension of source 
code changes. In this paper, we report a systematic literature survey on 
the practices, techniques, and challenges of code change comprehension. 
First, we explore common practices and information needs in modern code 
review that focuses exclusively on source code changes. We then present 
techniques that have been proposed to aid code change comprehension, 
followed by a discussion on the similarities and differences between code 
change comprehension and program comprehension techniques. With this 
knowledge of the state-of-the-art research, we identify major challenges 
of code change comprehension that are caused by insufficient tool support 
and developers’ not-so-recommended commit practices. Specifically, we 
discuss how developers’ commit practices and choices of SCMs can 
potentially affect the readability of resulting code changes and the later 
process of change comprehension.


Date:			Thursday, 13 June 2013

Time:                   3:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                        Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Sunghun Kim (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Raymond Wong
 			Dr. Charles Zhang


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