Version control systems are widely used to manage the evolution of software applications. However, such version control systems take source code as lines of plain text, and thus they cannot present the evolution of software entities embedded in the source code. To this end, a few approaches have been proposed to match software entities before and after a given commit, known as software entity matching algorithms. However, the accuracy of such algorithms requires further improvement. In this paper, we propose an automated iterative algorithm (called ReMapper) to match software entities between two successive versions. The key insight of ReMapper is that the qualified name, the implementation, and the references of a software entity together can distinguish it from others. It matches software entities iteratively because the mapping depends on the reference-based similarity whereas the reference-based similarity depends on the mapping of entities as well. We evaluated ReMapper on a benchmark consisting of 215 commits from 21 real-world projects. Our evaluation results suggest that ReMapper substantially outperformed the state of the art, reducing the number of mistakes (false positives plus false negatives) substantially by 85.8%. We also evaluated to what extent it may improve the automated refactoring discovery (mining) that relies heavily on automated entity matching. Our evaluation results suggest that it substantially improved the state of the art in refactoring discovery, improving recall by 6.9% and reducing the number of false positives by 72.6%.

@inproceedings{LiuLNZLJ23,
  title = {Automated Software Entity Matching Between Successive Versions},
  author = {Bo Liu and Hui Liu and Nan Niu and Yuxia Zhang and Guangjie Li and Yanjie Jiang},
  booktitle = {ASE},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1109/ase56229.2023.00132}
}