Are Suggestions of Coupled File Changes Interesting?

Jasmin Ramadani, Stefan Wagner

2016

Abstract

Software repositories include information which can be made available for bug fixing or maintenance using repository mining. The identification of coupled changes have been proposed several times. Yet, existing studies focus on the found couplings and ignore feedback from developers. We investigate three development projects and their repositories to find files that frequently change together to support the software developers. We complement the coupled files information with details from the issue tracking system and the project documentation. We contrast our findings with feedback from the developers about how interesting our findings are for them. We found that the small size of the repositories made an insightful analysis difficult. The response to coupled changes both from experienced and inexperienced developers was mostly neutral. They accepted most of the additional attributes we presented. Furthermore, developers also suggested other additional issues to be relevant, e.g. the context of the coupled changes and the way they are presented, which we did not cover in this study. Therefore, coupled change analysis research will need to take the presentation and context information into account.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Ramadani J. and Wagner S. (2016). Are Suggestions of Coupled File Changes Interesting? . In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-189-2, pages 15-26. DOI: 10.5220/0005854400150026

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase16,
author={Jasmin Ramadani and Stefan Wagner},
title={Are Suggestions of Coupled File Changes Interesting?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2016},
pages={15-26},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005854400150026},
isbn={978-989-758-189-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Software Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Are Suggestions of Coupled File Changes Interesting?
SN - 978-989-758-189-2
AU - Ramadani J.
AU - Wagner S.
PY - 2016
SP - 15
EP - 26
DO - 10.5220/0005854400150026