Understanding the Contribution of Non-source Documents in Improving Missing Link Recovery
Yan Sun, Qing Wang, Mingshu Li · 2016
Background: Links between issue reports and their fixing commits play an important role in software maintenance. Such link data are often missing in practice and many approaches have been proposed in order to recover them automatically. Most of existing approaches focus on comparing log messages and source code files in commits with issues reports. Besides the two kinds of data in commits, non-source documents (NSDs) such as change logs usually record the fixing activities and sometimes share similar texts as those in issue reports. However, few discussions have been made on the role of NSDs in designing link recovery approaches.