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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings No
Title Fine-Grained Analysis of Change Couplings
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Beat Fluri
  • Harald Gall
  • Martin Pinzger
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Page Range 66 - 74
Event Title Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation
Publisher IEEE Computer Society
Abstract Text In software evolution analysis, many approaches analyze release history data available through versioning systems. The recent investigations of CVS data have shown that commonly committed files highlight their change couplings. However, CVS stores modifications on the basis of text but does not track structural changes, such as the insertion, removing, or modification of methods or classes. A detailed analysis whether change couplings are caused by source code couplings or by other textual modifications, such as updates in license terms, is not performed by current approaches. The focus of this paper is on adding structural change information to existing release history data. We present an approach that uses the structure compare services shipped with the Eclipse IDE to obtain the corresponding fine-grained changes between two subsequent versions of any Java class. This information supports filtering those change couplings which result from structural changes. So we can distill the causes for change couplings along releases and filter out those that are structurally relevant. The first validation of our approach with a medium-sized open source software system showed that a reasonable amount of change couplings are not caused by source code changes.
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