Using structural holes metrics from communication networks to predict change dependencies

Igor Scaliante Wiese, Rodrigo Takashi Kuroda, Douglas Nassif Roma, Reginaldo Ré, Gustavo Ansaldi Oliva, Marco Aurelio Gerosa

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

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Conway's Law describes that software systems are structured according to the communication structures of their developers. These developers when working on a feature or correcting a bug commit together a set of source code artifacts. The analysis of these co-changes makes it possible to identify change dependencies between artifacts. Influenced by Conway's Law, we hypothesize that Structural Hole Metrics (SHM) are able to identify strong and weak change coupling. We used SHM computed from communication networks to predict co-changes among files. Comparing SHM against process metrics using six well-known classification algorithms applied to Rails and Node.js projects, we achieved recall and precision values near 80% in the best cases. Mathews Correlation metric was used to verify if SHM was able to identify strong and weak co-changes. We also extracted rules to provide insights about the metrics using classification tree. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigated social aspects to predict change dependencies and the results obtained are very promising.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCollaboration and Technology - 20th International Conference, CRIWG 2014, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer-Verlag
Pages294-310
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783319101651
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event20th International Conference on Collaboration and Technology, CRIWG 2014 - Santiago, Chile
Duration: Sep 7 2014Sep 10 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8658 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Collaboration and Technology, CRIWG 2014
Country/TerritoryChile
CitySantiago
Period9/7/149/10/14

Keywords

  • Conway's law
  • change dependencies
  • communication network
  • social network analysis
  • structural holes metrics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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