A Dataset from Change History to Support Evaluation of Software Maintenance Tasks

Approaches that support software maintenance need
to be evaluated and compared against existing ones, in order to
demonstrate their usefulness in practice. However, oftentimes the
lack of well-established sets of benchmarks leads to situations
where these approaches are evaluated using different datasets,
which results in biased comparisons. In this data paper we
describe and make publicly available a set of benchmarks from
six Java applications, which can be used in the evaluation of
various software engineering (SE) tasks, such as feature location
and impact analysis. These datasets consist of textual description
of change requests, the locations in the source code where they
were implemented, and execution traces. Four of the benchmarks
were already used in several SE research papers, and two of them
are new. In addition, we describe in detail the methodology used
for generating these benchmarks and provide a suite of tools in
order to encourage other researchers to validate our datasets and
generate new benchmarks for other subject software systems.
Our online appendix: http://www.cs.wm.edu/semeru/data/msr13/