Developer-Related Factors in Change Prediction

Developer-Related Factors in Change Prediction: An Empirical Assessment

Catolino, G. (University of Salerno)
Palomba, F. (TU Delft Software Engineering)
De Lucia, Andrea (University of Salerno)
Ferrucci, Filomena (University of Salerno)
Zaidman, A.E. (TU Delft Software Engineering)

2017

Predicting the areas of the source code having a higher likelihood to change in the future is a crucial activity to allow developers to plan preventive maintenance operations such as refactoring or peer-code reviews. In the past the research community was active in devising change prediction models based on structural metrics extracted from the source code. More recently, Elish et al. showed how evolution metrics can be more efficient for predicting change-prone classes. In this paper, we aim at making a further step ahead by investigating the role of different developer-related factors, which are able to capture the complexity of the development process under different perspectives, in the context of change prediction. We also compared such models with existing change-prediction models based on evolution and code metrics. Our findings reveal the capabilities of developer-based metrics in identifying classes of a software system more likely to be changed in the future. Moreover, we observed interesting complementarities among the experimented prediction models, that may possibly lead to the definition of new combined models exploiting developer-related factors as well as product and evolution metrics.

Change prediction
Empirical Studies
Mining Software Repositories

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:609aed88-329c-4844-b5b9-8c7967790db9

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC.2017.19

IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA

978-1-5386-0535-6

Proceedings - 2017 IEEE 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2017

ICPC 2017, 2017-05-22 → 2017-05-23, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2017 G. Catolino, F. Palomba, Andrea De Lucia, Filomena Ferrucci, A.E. Zaidman