Mining Code Change Patterns in Ada Projects

The Ada programming language, while not deemed as a mainstream choice for daily software applications, still plays a vital role in security-critical systems. Understanding how the source code of Ada projects changes over time can provide valuable insights into the maintenance and evolution of these software systems, which can be further leveraged for various software engineering tasks including refactoring recommendation and bug fixing. In this study, we employ fine-grained program dependence graphs to mine code change patterns of Ada-based systems. By analyzing 50 open-source Ada projects, we identify the typical modifications developers perform in Ada codebases and the underlying development activities that led to these changes. In comparison to Java code change patterns, our results indicate more diverse and specialized change practices in Ada software development.