Fine grained indexing of software repositories to support impact analysis

ABSTRACT

Versioned and bug-tracked software systems provide a huge amount of historical data regarding source code changes and issues management. In this paper we deal with impact analysis of a change request and show that data stored in software repositories are a good descriptor on how past change requests have been resolved. A fine grained analysis method of software repositories is used to index code at different levels of granularity, such as lines of code and source files, with free text contained in software repositories. The method exploits information retrieval algorithms to link the change request description and code entities impacted by similar past change requests. We evaluate such approach on a set of three open-source projects.

REFERENCES

• 1: Giuliano Antoniol , Gerardo Canfora , Gerardo Casazza , Andrea De Lucia , Ettore Merlo, Recovering Traceability Links between Code and Documentation, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.28 n.10, p.970-983, October 2002 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2002.1041053 ]
• 2: Robert S. Arnold , Shawn A. Bohner, Impact Analysis - Towards a Framework for Comparison, Proceedings of the Conference on Software Maintenance, p.292-301, September 01, 1993
• 3: Gerardo Canfora , Luigi Cerulo, Impact Analysis by Mining Software and Change Request Repositories, Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Software Metrics Symposium (METRICS'05), p.29, September 19-22, 2005 [doi>10.1109/METRICS.2005.28]
• 4: Andrew Y. Yao, CVSSearch: Searching through Source Code using CVS Comments, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'01), p.364, November 07-09, 2001
• 5: Fabio Crestani , Mounia Lalmas , Cornelis J. Van Rijsbergen , Iain Campbell, “Is this document relevant?…probably”: a survey of probabilistic models in information retrieval, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.30 n.4, p.528-552, Dec. 1998 [doi>10.1145/299917.299920]
• 6: Michael Fischer , Martin Pinzger , Harald Gall, Populating a Release History Database from Version Control and Bug Tracking Systems, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.23, September 22-26, 2003
• 7: K. Fogel and M. Bar. Cross-Validatory Choice and Assessment of Statistical Predictions (with Discussion), volume 36.J. the Royal Statistical Soc., 1974.
• 8: Karl Franz Fogel , Moshe Bar, Open Source Development with Cvs, Coriolis Group Books, Scottsdale, AZ, 2001
• 9: Ahmed E. Hassan , Richard C. Holt, Predicting Change Propagation in Software Systems, Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.284-293, September 11-14, 2004
• 10: K. Sparck Jones , S. Walker , S. E. Robertson, A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.36 n.6, p.779-808, Nov.06.2000 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(00)00015-7 ]
• 11: Mariam Kamkar, An overview and comparative classification of program slicing techniques, Journal of Systems and Software, v.31 n.3, p.197-214, Dec. 1995 [doi>10.1016/0164-1212(94)00099-9 ]
• 12: Mikael Lindvall , Kristian Sandahl, How well do experienced software developers predict software change?, Journal of Systems and Software, v.43 n.1, p.19-27, Oct. 1998 [doi>10.1016/S0164-1212(98)10019-5 ]
• 13: W. Miller and E. W. Myers. A file comparison program. Software Practice and Experience, 15(11):1025--1040, 1985.
• 14: Masaru Ohba , Katsuhiko Gondow, Toward mining "concept keywords" from identifiers in large software projects, Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, p.1-5, May 17-17, 2005, St. Louis, Missouri
• 15: Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Software engineering: theory and practice, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998
• 16: M. F. Porter. An algorithm for suffix stripping. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1997.
• 17: Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates , Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 18: Annie T. T. Ying , Gail C. Murphy , Raymond Ng , Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Predicting Source Code Changes by Mining Change History, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.30 n.9, p.574-586, September 2004 [doi>10.1109/TSE.2004.52]
• 19: Annie T. T. Ying , James L. Wright , Steven Abrams, Source code that talks: an exploration of Eclipse task comments and their implication to repository mining, Proceedings of the 2005 international workshop on Mining software repositories, p.1-5, May 17-17, 2005, St. Louis, Missouri
• 20: Thomas Zimmermann , Peter Weisgerber , Stephan Diehl , Andreas Zeller, Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes, Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering, p.563-572, May 23-28, 2004
• 21: T. Zimmermann and P. Weißgerber. Preprocessing CVS data for fine-grained analysis. In IEEE 26th International Conference on Software Engineering - The 1st International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, pages 2--6,2004.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement

General Terms:
Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
impact analysis, mining software repositories