Measuring Change-Readiness of Classes by Mining Change-History

Abstract

The change-history of a software system records how the system evolved over time. The change-history can tell which components (classes) are changed together, i.e. are change-coupled. In this paper, we propose two metrics for quantifying change-coupling among classes on the basis of their change-history and then propose another measure to compute a change-readiness index of the classes. The change-readiness of a class is measured as how much the class is ready to change. In this paper, we define change-history-based metrics, demonstrate computation of these measures by example and validate them theoretically. The SVNSearch subversion web-based utility has been used to mine the change logs of the EGit project of Eclipse. Further, change-readiness is computed for the classes of EGit and our findings are discussed. It has been found that the metrics based on change-history can be helpful to predict the future change behavior of the classes.