Mining Billions of AST Nodes to Study Actual and Potential Usage of Java Language Features

by Robert Dyer, Hridesh Rajan, Hoan Anh Nguyen, and Tien N. Nguyen

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Section 2 - JLS Background
• Section 4.2 - Dataset Metrics
• Section 5.1 - RQ1 - Do projects use new language features before the features are released?
• Section 5.2 - RQ2 - How frequently is each language feature used?
  • Section 5.2.1 - Investigating Frequently Used Features
• Section 5.3 - RQ3 - How did committers adopt and use language features?
  • Section 5.3.1 - RQ3.1 - How many committers adopted and used new features over time?
  • Section 5.3.2 - RQ3.2 - How much did committers use each feature?
  • Section 5.3.3 - RQ3.3 - Did committers adopt features on an individual basis or as a team?
  • Section 5.3.4 - RQ3.4 - Did committers use all new features?
• Section 5.4 - RQ4 - Were there missed opportunities to use language features?
• Section 5.5 - RQ5 - Was old code converted to use new language features?

Introduction

In this work, we used the Boa language and infrastructure to answer our research questions. Boa's website provides an interface for submitting queries in the form of Boa programs and selecting a dataset to query.

In this document we provide all Boa source code used to generate the data for this study. We also provide the output of running these Boa programs, which is the raw results for this study. These results were further processed to present them in the paper in a form easier to digest. The Java programs used to process the raw data and generate the tables and charts in the paper are also provided.

We provide these programs and data as an archival supplement to the paper, to allow researchers to understand our methodology and, if they wish, use the data to investigate their own research questions.

To generate the LaTeX tables used in the paper, you can run the following command:

./update-tables.sh

These commands assume the bash, java, and javac commands are in your path.

If you wish to cite this work, please use the following:

@inproceedings{Dyer-Rajan-Nguyen-Nguyen-14,
  author = {Dyer, Robert and Rajan, Hridesh and Nguyen, Hoan Anh and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {Mining Billions of {AST} Nodes to Study Actual and Potential Usage of {Java} Language Features},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  year = {2014},
  pages = {779--790},
  series = {{ICSE}'14},
  location = {Hyderabad, India},
}

[BibTeX]

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