Reordering Results of Keyword-Based Code Search for Supporting Simultaneous Code Changes

Many research studies have been conducted to help simultaneous code changes on multiple code fragments. Code clones and logical couplings are often utilized in such research studies. However, most of them have been evaluated on only open source projects or students´ software. In this paper, we report our academic-industrial collaboration with a software company. The collaboration is intended to suggest multiple code fragments to be changed simultaneously when a developer specifies a keyword such as variable names on source code. In the collaboration, we propose to use code clones and logical couplings information to reorder the code fragments. We confirmed that code clones and logical couplings worked well on helping simultaneous code changes on three projects that have being developed in the company.