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Empirical Software Engineering

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01-08-2012

Refining code ownership with synchronous changes

Authors: Lile Palma Hattori, Michele Lanza, Romain Robbes

Published in: Empirical Software Engineering | Issue 4-5/2012

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Abstract

When mining software repositories, two distinct sources of information are usually explored: the history log and snapshots of the system. Results of analyses derived from these two sources are biased by the frequency with which developers commit their changes. We argue that the usage of mainstream SCM (software configuration management) systems influences the way that developers work. For example, since it is tedious to resolve conflicts due to parallel commits, developers tend to minimize conflicts by not contemporarily modifying the same file. This however defeats one of the purposes of such systems. We mine repositories created by our tool Syde, which records changes in a central repository whenever a file is compiled locally in the IDE (integrated development environment) by any developer in a multi-developer project. This new source of information can augment the accuracy of analyses and breaks new ground in terms of how such information can assist developers. We illustrate how the information we mine provides a refined notion of code ownership with respect to the one inferred by SCM system data. We demonstrate our approach on three case studies, including an industrial one. Ownership models suffer from the assumption that developers have a perfect memory. To account for their imperfect memory, we integrate into our ownership measurement a model of memory retention, to simulate the effect of memory loss over time. We evaluate the characteristics of this model for several strengths of memory.

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See http://git-scm.com/.

See http://jazz.net.

In the meantime, Syde records more and more fine-grained information, whose description is outside the scope of this article.

In our case study, we have an industrial system that uses CVS, and two academic systems that use SVN. For the first, we only had access to the logs, but not to the source code. Thus, we decided to consistently apply the same approach to all three projects, by estimating the size of a file.

We use rectangles instead of circles for SCM logs so that one can differentiate between SCM changes and Syde changes when both are overlapped on the same map.

We use pseudonyms to conform with the non-disclosure agreement.

See http://www.cpmbraxis.com.

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Title: Refining code ownership with synchronous changes
Authors: Lile Palma Hattori
Michele Lanza
Romain Robbes
Publication date: 01-08-2012
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Empirical Software Engineering / Issue 4-5/2012
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-010-9145-5

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The evolution of Java build systems

Time variance and defect prediction in software projects

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Analyzing and mining a code search engine usage log

Evaluating defect prediction approaches: a benchmark and an extensive comparison

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