The Impact of Tangled Code Changes

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2013-05-16 16:10

Title	The Impact of Tangled Code Changes
Publication Type	Conference Proceedings
Year of Publication	2013
Authors	Herzig, K, Zeller, A
Refereed Designation	Refereed
Secondary Title	10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Date Published	05/2013
Keywords	bias, data quality, history, java, mining software repositories, noise, tangled code changes, version control
Abstract	When interacting with version control systems, developers often commit unrelated or loosely related code changes in a single transaction. When analyzing the version history, such tangled changes will make all changes to all modules appear related, possibly compromising the resulting analyses through noise and bias. In an investigation of ﬁve open-source JAVA projects, we found up to 15% of all bug ﬁxes to consist of multiple tangled changes. Using a multi-predictor approach to untangle changes, we show that on average at least 16.6% of all source ﬁles are incorrectly associated with bug reports. We recommend better change organization to limit the impact of tangled changes.
URL	http://www.kim-herzig.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/msr2013-untangling.pdf
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