Predicting Change Propagation from Repository Information

Igor Scaliante Wiese, Reginaldo Ré, Igor Steinmacher, Rodrigo Takashi Kuroda, Gustavo Ansaldi Oliva, Marco Aurélio Gerosa

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Change propagation occurs when a change in an artifact leads to changes in other artifacts. Previous research has used frequency of past changes between artifacts and different types of artifacts coupling to build prediction models of change propagation. To improve the accuracy of the prediction, we explored the combination of different data from software development repository, such as change requests, communication data, and artifacts modifications. This information can capture different dimensions of software development, what can lead to improvements on the accuracy of the models. We conducted an empirical study in four open source projects, namely Cassandra, Camel, Hadoop, and Lucene. Classifiers were constructed for each pair of artifacts that change together to predict if the change propagation between two files occurs in a certain change request. The models obtained values of area under the curve (AUC) of 0.849 on average. Furthermore, the sensitivity (recall) obtained is almost 4 times higher (57.06% vs. 15.70%) when compared our models to a baseline model built using association rules. With a reduced number of false positives, the models could be used in practice to help developers during software evolution.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages100-109
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781467392723
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 11 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015 - Belo Horizonte - MG, Brazil
Duration: Sep 21 2015Sep 25 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings - 29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015

Conference

Conference29th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2015
Country/TerritoryBrazil
CityBelo Horizonte - MG
Period9/21/159/25/15

Keywords

  • change coupling
  • change propagation
  • co-change
  • prediction models

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Predicting Change Propagation from Repository Information'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this