A Study of the Uniqueness of Source Code

Created by W.Langdon from gp-bibliography.bib Revision:1.2031

@InProceedings{Gabel:2010:FSE,
  author =       "Mark Gabel and Zhendong Su",
  title =        "A Study of the Uniqueness of Source Code",
  booktitle =    "Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT
                 international symposium on Foundations of software
                 engineering",
  year =         "2010",
  pages =        "147--156",
  address =      "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
  month =        "7-11 " # nov,
  publisher =    "ACM",
  acmid =        "1882315",
  keywords =     "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, large scale
                 study, software uniqueness, source code",
  isbn13 =       "978-1-60558-791-2",
  URL =          "http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~su/publications/fse10.pdf",
  doi =          "doi:10.1145/1882291.1882315",
  size =         "10 pages",
  abstract =     "This paper presents the results of the first study of
                 the uniqueness of source code. We define the uniqueness
                 of a unit of source code with respect to the entire
                 body of written software, which we approximate with a
                 corpus of 420 million lines of source code. Our
                 high-level methodology consists of examining a
                 collection of 6,000 software projects and measuring the
                 degree to which each project can be `assembled' solely
                 from portions of this corpus, thus providing a precise
                 measure of `uniqueness' that we call syntactic
                 redundancy. We parametrised our study over a variety of
                 variables, the most important of which being the level
                 of granularity at which we view source code. Our suite
                 of experiments together consumed approximately four
                 months of CPU time, providing quantitative answers to
                 the following questions: at what levels of granularity
                 is software unique, and at a given level of
                 granularity, how unique is software? While we believe
                 these questions to be of intrinsic interest, we discuss
                 possible applications to genetic programming and
                 developer productivity tools.",
  notes =        "Brief mention of GP and how their results apply to GP.
                 C,C++,Java. n-grams.

                 p147 'Singularity in software engineering's future'.
                 p149 'syntactically redundant' p152 'striking
                 similarity' between 30 current sourceforge projects.
                 p155 Almost all small code fragments have been written
                 many times (Small means 'approximately one to seven
                 lines of source code'). Cites Jiang and Zu ISSTA 2009,
                 \cite{koza:book} and \cite{Weimer:2009:ICES}.

                 FSE '10, Gabel:2010:SUS:1882291.1882315",
}

Genetic Programming entries for Mark Gabel Zhendong Su