LAC: Locating and Applying Consistent and Repetitive Changes

As a software system evolves, constant changes are usually made in the code. Similar changes to code fragments often occur in multiple locations. It is very tedious and error prone for developers to manually update similar changes in multiple locations. To address this problem, we propose an approach for Locating and Applying Consistent and Repetitive Changes (LAC) as an Eclipse plug-in. LAC analyzes the code fragments to detect change anomalies, such as omissions or inconsistent edits, and automatically repairs these anomalies by applying required changes. Our static analysis technique to detect anomalies is carried out by inferring change patterns. The evaluation results in a user study show that automatically applying repetitive changes in identified locations using LAC correctly matches with that of manually updated ones, which significantly decreases manual efforts and error-prone edits.