Approximate Code Search in Program Histories

Abstract

Very often a defect must be corrected not only in the current version of a program at one particular place but in many places and many other versions -- possibly even in different development branches. Consequently, we need a technique to efficiently locate all approximate matches of an arbitrary defective code fragment in the program's history as they may need to be fixed as well. This paper presents an approximate whole-program code search in multiple releases and branches. We evaluate this technique for real-world defects of various large and realistic programs having multiple releases and branches. We report runtime measurements and recall using varying levels of allowable differences of the approximate search.