Recommending change clusters to support software investigation: an empirical study

  • Authors:

  • Martin P. Robillard;Barthélémy Dagenais

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada;School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2008)
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

During software maintenance tasks, developers often spend a valuable amount of effort investigating source code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to help developers navigate the source code effectively. We studied to what extent developers can benefit from information contained in clusters of change sets to guide their investigation of a software system. We defined change clusters as groups of change sets that have a certain amount of elements in common. Our analysis of 4200 change sets for seven different systems and covering a cumulative time span of over 17 years of development showed that less than one in five tasks overlapped with change clusters. Furthermore, a detailed qualitative analysis of the results revealed that only 13% of the clusters associated with applicable change tasks were likely to be useful. We conclude that change clusters can only support a minority of change tasks, and should only be recommended if it is possible to do so at minimal cost to the developers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. We studied to what extent clusters of change sets extracted from a software system's revision history can guide developers in their investigation of the system. Our analyses of 4200 change sets for seven different systems revealed that only 13% of the clusters associated with applicable change tasks were likely to be useful. We conclude that change clusters should only be recommended if it is possible to do so at minimal cost to the developers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.