[Research Paper] The Case for Adaptive Change Recommendation

Abstract

As the complexity of a software system grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to be aware of all the dependencies that exist between artifacts (e.g., files or methods) of the system. Change impact analysis helps to overcome this problem, as it recommends to a developer relevant source-code artifacts related to her current changes. Association rule mining has shown promise in determining change impact by uncovering relevant patterns in the system's change history. State-of-the-art change impact mining algorithms typically make use of a change history of tens of thousands of transactions. For efficiency, targeted association rule mining focuses on only those transactions potentially relevant to answering a particular query. However, even targeted algorithms must consider the complete set of relevant transactions in the history. This paper presents ATARI, a new adaptive approach to association rule mining that considers a dynamic selection of the relevant transactions. It can be viewed as a further constrained version of targeted association rule mining, in which as few as a single transaction might be considered when determining change impact. Our investigation of adaptive change impact mining empirically studies seven algorithm variants. We show that adaptive algorithms are viable, can be just as applicable as the start-of-the-art complete-history algorithms, and even outperform them for certain queries. However, more important than the direct comparison, our investigation lays necessary groundwork for the future study of adaptive techniques and their application to challenges such as the on-the-fly style of impact analysis that is needed at the GitHub-scale.