Analysing Software Repositories to Understand Software Evolution

Abstract

Software repositories such as versioning systems, defect tracking systems, and archived communication between project personnel are used to help manage the progress of software projects. Software practitioners and researchers increasingly recognize the potential benefit of mining this information to support the maintenance of software systems, improve software design or reuse, and empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. Research is now proceeding to uncover ways in which mining these repositories can help to understand software development, to support predictions about software development, and to plan various evolutionary aspects of software projects. This chapter presents several analysis and visualization techniques to understand software evolution by exploiting the rich sources of artifacts that are available. Based on the data models that need to be developed to cover sources such as modification and bug reports we describe how to use a Release History Database for evolution analysis. For that we present approaches to analyze developer effort for particular software entities. Further we present change coupling analyses that can reveal hidden change dependencies among software entities. Finally, we show how to investigate architectural shortcomings over many releases and to identify trends in the evolution. Kiviat graphs can be effectively used to visualize such analysis results.

SEON: a pyramid of ontologies for software evolution and its applications

“…The Mining Software Repositories 7 community tackled this issue by mirroring software artifacts from various sources in a central (relational) database [9]. This gave rise to numerous experiments where researchers successfully mined such databases for interesting patterns (see [34] for an overview; specific examples can be found in [7,16,19,52]).…”

A detailed examination of the correlation between imports and failure-proneness of software components

“…Failure-prone files are grouped into their corresponding versions using the version field of the bug report. This technique for mapping bug fixes to bug reports has been used by other researchers [5,14,15,16]. We used the repository mining feature of SemDiff [4] to retrieve the commit transactions of Eclipse from CVS, and the Bugzilla connector of Mylyn 3 for communicating with the Eclipse bug database.…”

Free and open source software development: the end of the teenage years

“…Researchers from different areas and backgrounds are able to analyze publicly available data to better understand how software is developed [8,9], learn from it [10,11], and to propose ways to improve FOSS processes [12][13][14]. The available data range from technical artifacts, to messages exchanged via mailing lists, forums and chats, and discussions on tasks.…”

“…The available data range from technical artifacts, to messages exchanged via mailing lists, forums and chats, and discussions on tasks. All these factors attracted and enabled studies related to management [15][16][17], software architecture and evolution [9,[18][19][20], software testing [21], human and social aspects of software engineering [22][23][24][25], software engineering education [26][27][28][29], etc.…”