Mining Software Revision History Using Advanced Social Network Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel method to investigate relationship between the files that are committed together by applying advanced social network analysis to a "network" of source files that are committed together. The source files constitute the nodes of the network and an edge is created between files which are committed together in the same revision. We present our findings with recommendations on how mining revision histories from a social network analysis perspective can be used to build inferences on change propagation, evaluate impact analysis, and extract cross-programming-language relationships. We performed empirical analysis on revision histories of a well-known open-source web application testing system, 'Selenium' and results are reported.