Correctness of data mined from CVS
Christopher Thomson, Mike Holcombe · 2008
Source code repositories managed by the popular CVS are frequently mined by researchers to validate various hypotheses about how the development of a software product progressed. This paper presents a study where the development process of 17 student teams was followed. It will show that in an environment where the teams were permitted to manage their own CVS repositories that several errors emerged that could lead to the misinterpretation of a hypothesis. These were classified into three types: type one errors which relate to the non-use of the system; type two errors that emerged from the direct manipulation of the repository; and type three errors from the limitation of CVS not to record file name changes.