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Connecting Source Code Changes with Reasons

Authors:
Namita Dave
Renan Peixoto da Silva
David Drobesh
Pragya Upreti
William Erdly
Hazeline Asuncion

Keywords: software evolution tools; software traceability; software maintenance

Abstract:
Understanding the reasons behind software changes is a challenging task, as explanations are not always apparent or accessible. In addition, when third party consumers of software try to understand a change, it becomes even more difficult since they are not closely working with the code. To address these challenges, we propose a technique for explicitly connecting code changes with their reasons, referred to as Flexible Artifact Change and Traceability Support (FACTS). FACTS presents a holistic view of changes by (1) generating traceability links for code changes at different levels of abstraction and (2) tracing code changes to heterogeneously represented reasons. Our user experiment indicates that FACTS is useful in understanding code changes.

Pages: 19 to 25

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: March 25, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4375

ISBN: 978-1-61208-620-0

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from March 25, 2018 to March 29, 2018