Abstract
Change recommendation improves the development speed and quality of software projects. Through change recommendation, software project developers can find the relevant source files that they must change for their modification tasks. In an existing change-recommendation approach based on the change history of source files, the reliability of the recommended change patterns for a source file is determined according to the change history of the source file. If a source file has insufficient change history to identify its change patterns or has frequently been changed with unrelated source files, the existing change-recommendation approach cannot identify meaningful change patterns for the source file. In this paper, we propose a novel change-recommendation approach to resolve the limitation of the existing change-recommendation method. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to consider the change history of a test file corresponding to a given source file. First, the proposed approach identifies the test file corresponding to a given source file by using a source–test traceability linking method based on the popular naming convention rule. Then, the change patterns of the source and test files are identified according to their change histories. Finally, a set of change recommendations is constructed using the identified change patterns. In an experiment involving six open-source projects, the accuracy of the proposed approach is evaluated. The results show that the accuracy of the proposed approach can be significantly improved from 21% to 62% compared with the existing approach.
Highlights
Software systems constantly evolve to improve their quality and extend their lifetime [1,2,3].As a software system evolves, its source files are inevitably changed [4,5,6,7,8]
The proposed change-recommendation approach considers the change history of a given source file, and the change history of a test file corresponding to the given source file to make a change recommendation
Given a source file as a query for change recommendation, the proposed approach first identifies a test file corresponding to the given source file by using a source–test traceability linking method based on the naming convention rule
Summary
Software systems constantly evolve to improve their quality and extend their lifetime [1,2,3]. Two source files have low change coupling if they have been rarely changed together According to this concept, the change recommendation approach requires sufficient and clear change history for source files as much as possible to identify meaningful change patterns. We believe that some of the closely related change patterns of a source files can be identified in the change history of the corresponding test file. In software development, source files are paired with their corresponding test files according to a specific naming convention rule [29]. Given a source file as a query for change recommendation, the proposed approach first identifies a test file corresponding to the given source file by using a source–test traceability linking method based on the naming convention rule.
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