%0 Conference Paper %B Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories %D 2006 %T Using evolutionary annotations from change logs to enhance program comprehension %A Daniel M. German %A Peter C. Rigby %A Storey, Margaret-Anne %K annotations %K apache %K bug tracking %K change history %K eclipse %K evolutionary %K log files %K mailing lists %K mining software repositories %K software evolution %K version control %X Evolutionary annotations are descriptions of how source code evolves over time. Typical source comments, given their static nature, are usually inadequate for describing how a program has evolved over time; instead, source code comments are typically a description of what a program currently does. We propose the use of evolutionary annotations as a way of describing the rationale behind changes applied to a given program (for example "These lines were added to ..."). Evolutionary annotations can assist a software developer in the understanding of how a given portion of source code works by showing him how the source has evolved into its current form.In this paper we describe a method to automatically create evolutionary annotations from change logs, defect tracking systems and mailing lists. We describe the design of a prototype for Eclipse that can filter and present these annotations alongside their corresponding source code and in workbench views. We use Apache as a test case to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. %B Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories %S MSR '06 %I ACM %C New York, NY, USA %P 159–162 %@ 1-59593-397-2 %U http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138020 %R http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1137983.1138020 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/159UsingEvolutionary.pdf