Retrieving Task-Related Clusters from Change History
M. Robillard, und B. Dagenais. Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Antwerp, Belgium, (Oktober 2008)
Zusammenfassung
During software maintenance tasks, developers often
spend an important amount of effort investigating source
code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to
help developers navigate the source code effectively. For
this purpose, we propose to search the change history of
a software system to identify clusters of program elements
related to a task. We evaluated the feasibility of this idea
with an extensive historical analysis of change data. Our
study evaluated to what extent change sets approximating
tasks could have benefited from knowledge about clusters
of past changes. A study of 3 500 change sets for seven different
systems and covering a cumulative time span of close
to 12 years of development shows that less than 12% of the
changes could have benefited from change clusters. We report
on our observations on the factors that influence how
we can use change clusters to guide program navigation.
%0 Conference Paper
%1 robillard08wcre
%A Robillard, Martin
%A Dagenais, Barthélémy
%B Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
%C Antwerp, Belgium
%D 2008
%K change empirical evolution msr
%T Retrieving Task-Related Clusters from Change History
%U http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~martin/papers/wcre2008.pdf
%X During software maintenance tasks, developers often
spend an important amount of effort investigating source
code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to
help developers navigate the source code effectively. For
this purpose, we propose to search the change history of
a software system to identify clusters of program elements
related to a task. We evaluated the feasibility of this idea
with an extensive historical analysis of change data. Our
study evaluated to what extent change sets approximating
tasks could have benefited from knowledge about clusters
of past changes. A study of 3 500 change sets for seven different
systems and covering a cumulative time span of close
to 12 years of development shows that less than 12% of the
changes could have benefited from change clusters. We report
on our observations on the factors that influence how
we can use change clusters to guide program navigation.
@inproceedings{robillard08wcre,
abstract = {During software maintenance tasks, developers often
spend an important amount of effort investigating source
code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to
help developers navigate the source code effectively. For
this purpose, we propose to search the change history of
a software system to identify clusters of program elements
related to a task. We evaluated the feasibility of this idea
with an extensive historical analysis of change data. Our
study evaluated to what extent change sets approximating
tasks could have benefited from knowledge about clusters
of past changes. A study of 3 500 change sets for seven different
systems and covering a cumulative time span of close
to 12 years of development shows that less than 12% of the
changes could have benefited from change clusters. We report
on our observations on the factors that influence how
we can use change clusters to guide program navigation.},
added-at = {2008-10-28T17:23:21.000+0100},
address = {Antwerp, Belgium},
author = {Robillard, Martin and Dagenais, Barthélémy},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2cc3b4a017b1bae947cc0d339369062d9/neilernst},
booktitle = {Working Conference on Reverse Engineering},
interhash = {714c52f78d9483c02db229c88c48e861},
intrahash = {cc3b4a017b1bae947cc0d339369062d9},
keywords = {change empirical evolution msr},
month = {October},
timestamp = {2009-03-01T23:43:19.000+0100},
title = {Retrieving Task-Related Clusters from Change History},
url = {http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~martin/papers/wcre2008.pdf},
year = 2008
}