Data Mining Version Histories – WSR 2004

by Thomas Zimmermann, Andreas Zeller

Program analysis long has been understood as the analysis of source code alone. A modern software product, though, is more than just program code; it contains documentation, interface descriptions, resource data?all of which must be maintained and organized. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to maintain such non-program entities: By learning from the development history of the product, we can determine coupling between entities: "Programmers who changed ComparePreferencePage.java typically also changed plugin.properties." As a first proof of concept, our ROSE plug-in for ECLIPSE automatically guides the programmer along related changes.

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See also: http://www.softevo.org/

Reference

Thomas Zimmermann, Andreas Zeller. Data Mining Version Histories. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop Software Reengineering (WSR 2004), Bad Honnef, Germany, May 2004. Proceedings also appeared in Softwaretechnik-Trends (24:2), published by the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{zimmermann-wsr-2004,
    title = "Data Mining Version Histories",
    author = "Thomas Zimmermann and Andreas Zeller",
    year = "2004",
    month = "May",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop Software Reengineering",
    location = "Bad Honnef, Germany",
}