Yujiang Yang, Kazunori Sakamoto, Hironori Washizaki, and Yoshiaki Fukazawa, “A Tool to Suggest Similar Program Element Modifications,” 21st Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2014), Jeju, Korea, December 1-4, 2014. (to appear) (CORE Rank B, acceptance rate 67/226=30%)

Many program tasks require continuous modification of similar program elements, which is burdensome on programmers because continuous modifications are time consuming and some modifications are easily overlooked. To resolve this issue, we extracted all possible matching elements via similarity patterns from recently modified elements using a sub syntax tree comparison and then created a tool, SimilarHighlight. Our tool suggests similar program elements that may be modified during the next modification. Potential elements are highlighted and their text can be immediately selected by shortcut keys. Evaluations indicate that SimilarHighlight can improve programming productivity. Currently, our tool supports C, C#, JAVA, JavaScript, and PHP, but in the future we will expand it to other languages.