A Study on A Tool to Suggest Similar Program Element Modifications

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, I extracted all possible matching elements via similarity patterns from recently modified elements using a sub syntax tree comparison and then created a tool, SimilarHighlight. My 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, the tool supports C, C#, JAVA, and JavaScript, but in the future I will expand it to other languages.