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An empirical study of fine-grained software modifications

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Abstract

Software is typically improved and modified in small increments (we refer to each of these increments as a modification record—MR). MRs are usually stored in a configuration management or version control system and can be retrieved for analysis. In this study we retrieved the MRs from several mature open software projects. We then concentrated our analysis on those MRs that fix defects and provided heuristics to automatically classify them. We used the information in the MRs to visualize what files are changed at the same time, and who are the people who tend to modify certain files. We argue that these visualizations can be used to understand the development stage of in which a project is at a given time (new features are added, or defects are being fixed), the level of modularization of a project, and how developers might interact between each other and the source code of a system.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Advanced Systems Institute of British Columbia. The author would like to thank the reviewers of this paper for their thoughtful comments that greatly improved the quality of this paper, and the Apache, Evolution, GNU gcc, Mozilla and PostgreSQL development teams.

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  1. Software Engineering Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

    Daniel M. German

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  1. Daniel M. German
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Correspondence to Daniel M. German.

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German, D.M. An empirical study of fine-grained software modifications. Empir Software Eng 11, 369–393 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-006-9004-6

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