Header

UZH-Logo

Maintenance Infos

Can we predict types of code changes? An empirical analysis


Giger, Emanuel; Pinzger, Martin; Gall, Harald C (2012). Can we predict types of code changes? An empirical analysis. In: 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Zurich, Switzerland, 2 June 2012 - 3 June 2012. IEEE, 217-226.

Abstract

There exist many approaches that help in pointing developers to the change-prone parts of a software system. Although beneficial, they mostly fall short in providing details of these changes. Fine-grained source code changes (SCC) capture such detailed code changes and their semantics on the statement level. These SCC can be condition changes, interface modifications, inserts or deletions of methods and attributes, or other kinds of statement changes. In this paper, we explore prediction models for whether a source file will be affected by a certain type of SCC. These predictions are computed on the static source code dependency graph and use social network centrality measures and object-oriented metrics. For that, we use change data of the Eclipse platform and the Azureus 3 project. The results show that Neural Network models can predict categories of SCC types. Furthermore, our models can output a list of the potentially change-prone files ranked according to their change-proneness, overall and per change type category.

Abstract

There exist many approaches that help in pointing developers to the change-prone parts of a software system. Although beneficial, they mostly fall short in providing details of these changes. Fine-grained source code changes (SCC) capture such detailed code changes and their semantics on the statement level. These SCC can be condition changes, interface modifications, inserts or deletions of methods and attributes, or other kinds of statement changes. In this paper, we explore prediction models for whether a source file will be affected by a certain type of SCC. These predictions are computed on the static source code dependency graph and use social network centrality measures and object-oriented metrics. For that, we use change data of the Eclipse platform and the Azureus 3 project. The results show that Neural Network models can predict categories of SCC types. Furthermore, our models can output a list of the potentially change-prone files ranked according to their change-proneness, overall and per change type category.

Statistics

Citations

Dimensions.ai Metrics

Altmetrics

Downloads

223 downloads since deposited on 29 Jan 2013
20 downloads since 12 months
Detailed statistics

Additional indexing

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper), refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:03 Faculty of Economics > Department of Informatics
Dewey Decimal Classification:000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
Scopus Subject Areas:Physical Sciences > Computer Science Applications
Physical Sciences > Software
Language:English
Event End Date:3 June 2012
Deposited On:29 Jan 2013 09:44
Last Modified:19 Mar 2022 08:10
Publisher:IEEE
Series Name:IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
ISSN:2160-1852
ISBN:978-1-4673-1760-3
Additional Information:© 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
OA Status:Green
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR.2012.6224284
Other Identification Number:merlin-id:7101
  • Content: Accepted Version