Discovering Patterns of Change Types

Beat Fluri, Emanuel Giger, Harald C. Gall

PDF DOI 10.1109/ase.2008.74 dblp

Abstract

The reasons why software is changed are manyfold; new features are added, bugs have to be fixed, or the consistency of coding rules has to be re-established. Since there are many types of of source code changes we want to explore whether they appear frequently together in time and whether they describe specific development activities. We describe a semi-automated approach to discover patterns of such change types using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We extracted source code changes of one commercial and two open-source software systems and applied the clustering. We found that change type patterns do describe development activities and affect the control flow, the exception flow, or change the API.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Fluri-al:ASE08,
  author    = {Beat Fluri and
               Emanuel Giger and
               Harald C. Gall},
  title     = {Discovering Patterns of Change Types},
  booktitle = {ASE},
  pages     = {463--466},
  publisher = {{IEEE} Computer Society},
  year      = {2008},
}

Discovering Patterns of Change Types

Abstract

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