Discovering Patterns of Change Types

Discovering Patterns of Change Types

inproceedings
Beat Fluri, Emanuel Giger, Harald C. Gall
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.
Discovering Patterns of Change Types
2008
IEEE Computer Society
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
September
4
s.e.a.l.