research-article

Detection of software evolution phases based on development activities

Authors:

Houari Sahraoui,

Mohamed Aymen SaiedAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 15 - 24

Published: 16 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Software evolution history is usually represented at fine granularity by commits in software repositories, and at coarse granularity by software releases. In order to gain insights on development activities and on software evolution, the information on releases is too general, whereas the information on commits is prohibitively large to be efficiently processed by a developer. This paper proposes an automatic technique for the identification of distinct phases of evolution. Such software evolution phases are characterized by similar development activities in terms of changes to entities. Therefore, our technique decomposes software evolution history to assist developers identify periods of different development activities. Our analysis technique is a search-based optimization of the best decomposition of commits from the software repository using heuristics such as classes changed in each commit, and the magnitude/importance of these changes. To validate our technique, we applied it on the evolution history of five case studies covering multiple releases over several years of development. An interesting outcome of the evaluation is that our automatic decomposition of software evolution history recovered the original decomposition in software releases.

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Cited By

Saied MSahraoui HBatot EFamelis MTalbot PTakadama K(2018)Towards the automated recovery of complex temporal API-usage patternsProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3205455.3205622(1435-1442)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3205455.3205622
Hecht GBenomar ORouvoy RMoha NDuchien LCohen MGrunske LWhalen M(2015)Tracking the software quality of Android applications along their evolutionProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2015.46(236-247)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2015.46

Index Terms

Detection of software evolution phases based on development activities
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
      2. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
    2. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '15: Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

May 2015

325 pages

General Chair:
Andrea De Lucia
University of Salerno, Italy
,
Program Chairs:
Christian Bird
Microsoft Research
,
Rocco Oliveto
University of Molise, Italy

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society
TCSE: IEEE Computer Society's Tech. Council on Software Engin.

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IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 16 May 2015

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ICSE '15

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ICSE '15: 37th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 16 - 24, 2015

Florence, Italy

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Cited By

Saied MSahraoui HBatot EFamelis MTalbot PTakadama K(2018)Towards the automated recovery of complex temporal API-usage patternsProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference10.1145/3205455.3205622(1435-1442)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3205455.3205622
Hecht GBenomar ORouvoy RMoha NDuchien LCohen MGrunske LWhalen M(2015)Tracking the software quality of Android applications along their evolutionProceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1109/ASE.2015.46(236-247)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASE.2015.46

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