Interaction histories mining for software change guide

Abstract

This paper presents a prediction model for change propagation based on the developers 'interaction history. Since artifacts have internal and external dependencies, a change will cause some changes on related artifacts. In order to guide change operations in software development, our proposed method generates a change guide graph by mining developers' interaction histories which consist of write and read accesses to artifacts. Using a change guide graph, we can guide change using the context of previous changes. To evaluate proposed change guide method, we perform a case study with an open-source software. We show that the context information is effective for file level and method level change predictions.