Linking Source Code to Untangled Change Intents

Xiaoyu Liu, LiGuo Huang, Chuanyi Li, and Vincent Ng.
Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution pp. 422-432, 2018.

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Abstract

Previous work suggests that tangled changes (i.e., different change intents aggregated in one single commit message) could complicate tracing to different change tasks when developers manage software changes. Identifying links from changed source code to untangled change intents could help developers solve this problem. Manually identifying such links requires lots of experience and review efforts, however. Unfortunately, there is no automatic method that provides this capability. In this paper, we propose AutoCILink, which automatically identifies code to untangled change intent links with a pattern-based link identification system (AutoCILink-P) and a supervised learning-based link classification system (AutoCILink-ML). Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of both systems: the pattern-based AutoCILink-P and the supervised learning-based AutoCILink-ML achieve average accuracy of 74.6% and 81.2%, respectively.

BibTeX entry

@InProceedings{Liu+etal:18a,
  author = {Xiaoyu Liu and LiGuo Huang and Chuanyi Li and Vincent Ng},
  title = {Linking Source Code to Untangled Change Intents},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution},
  pages = {422--432},
  year = 2018}