INGI Seminar

A Language-Parametric Toolchain for Mining Idiomatic Code Patterns

by Johan Fabry, Senior Software Engineer at Raincode

This talk shows the code pattern mining toolchain being developed as part of the INTiMALS research project. This project's goal is to research and deploy novel pattern mining algorithms in an industrial prototype of an intelligent modernization assistant for legacy software systems. Ultimately, the assistant should pro-actively recommend software engineers source code modernization actions by comparing their current development efforts with insights gained by treating source code repositories as data. The current tools allow to mine for previously unknown patterns in the system's source code to reveal programming idioms and coding conventions. Found patterns and their matches can then be interactively explored in a GUI pattern browser.

We will show a demo in which we dive in to a typical pattern exploration session, using JHotdraw as an example system. We will show how the pattern miner can be parametrized to reveal different kinds of patterns. Then we will interactively explore the results of mining and show how the pattern browser allows us to get an understanding of the patterns found by the miner.

Dr. Johan Fabry is a Senior Software Engineer at Raincode labs. Previously he was a professor at the Pleiad and RyCh Labs of the Universidad de Chile for a decade, doing research in programming languages, modularity and software engineering for robotics. He obtained his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2005. He is @johanfabry on twitter.