How do software engineers understand code changes?
Yida Tao, Yingnong Dang, Tao Xie, Dongmei Zhang, Sunghun Kim · 2012
Software evolves with continuous source-code changes. These code changes usually need to be understood by software engineers when performing their daily development and maintenance tasks. However, despite its high importance, such change-understanding practice has not been systematically studied. Such lack of empirical knowledge hinders attempts to evaluate this fundamental practice and improve the corresponding tool support.