Is it dangerous to use version control histories to study source code evolution?
ECOOP'12 Proceedings of the 26th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
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Commercial software development teams have limited time available to focus on improvements to their software. These teams need a way to quickly identify areas of the source code that would benefit from improvement, as well as quantifiable data to defend the selected improvements to management. Past research has shown that mining configuration management systems for change information can be useful in determining faulty areas of the code. We present a tool named Code Hot Spot, which mines change records out of Microsoft's TFS configuration management system and creates a report of hot spots. Hot spots are contiguous areas of the code that have higher values of metrics that are indicators of faulty code. We present a study where we use this tool to study projects at ABB to determine areas that need improvement. The resulting data have been used to prioritize areas for additional code reviews and unit testing, as well as identifying change prone areas in need of refactoring.