The effect of IMPORT change in software change history
Jungil Kim, Eun-Joo Lee · 2014
Source code change analysis in the project history is one of main issues in mining software repositories, which incorporates change prediction, API evolution and refactoring, etc. In the previous studies, fine-grained source code changes, that is, code level changes, were used to find source code change patterns. In this paper, we closely investigate IMPORT change type, which has not been unnoticed. At first, we performed modifying the existing change extraction tool, change distiller [3], to extract IMPORT change history. And then, we extracted commit history data from project repository of eclipse CDT and IDT. Change types for each change in commit history data have been determined using change types in [3] and IMPORT change types defined in this work. Finally, we analyzed the effect of IMPORT change using the frequency of each change type occurred in the commit history. Experimental result shows that the IMPORT change meaningfully affects other changes and it would be better to consider IMPORT change types in change analysis work.