Investigation of Coding Patterns over Version History

A coding pattern is a sequence of method calls and control structures, which appears repeatedly in the source code. In this paper, we have extracted coding patterns of each version of two Java applications, and then explored the life-span of all of the coding patterns across those versions. This paper reports the characteristics of coding patterns of various life-spans. While learning from coding patterns enables us to perform appropriate modifications and enhancements for the software, many coding patterns are unstable as similar to the result of clone genealogy research.