A Study on Inappropriately Partitioned Commits — How Much and What Kinds of IP Commits in Java Projects? —

Abstract

When we use code repositories, each commit should include code changes for only a single task and code changes for a single task should not be scattered over multiple commits. There are many studies on the former violation–often referred to as tangled commits–but the latter violation has been out of scope for MSR research. In this paper, we firstly investigate how much and what kinds of inappropriately partitioned commits in Java projects. Then, we propose a simple technique to detect such commits automatically. We also report evaluation results of the proposed technique.