The impact of tangled code changes on defect prediction models

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• 作者：Kim Herzig ; Sascha Just ; Andreas Zeller
• 关键词：Defect prediction ; Untangling ; Data noise
• 刊名：Empirical Software Engineering
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：April 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：21
• 期：2
• 页码：303-336
• 全文大小：2,713 KB
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• 作者单位：Kim Herzig (1)
  Sascha Just (2)
  Andreas Zeller (2)
  
  1. Microsoft Research, 21 Station Road, Cambridge, CB1 2DZ, UK
  2. Saarland University, Campus E1.1, 66123, Saarbücken, Germany
  
• 刊物类别：Computer Science
• 刊物主题：Software Engineering, Programming and Operating Systems
  Programming Languages, Compilers and Interpreters
  
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-7616

文摘

When interacting with source control management system, developers often commit unrelated or loosely related code changes in a single transaction. When analyzing version histories, such tangled changes will make all changes to all modules appear related, possibly compromising the resulting analyses through noise and bias. In an investigation of five open-source Java projects, we found between 7 % and 20 % of all bug fixes to consist of multiple tangled changes. Using a multi-predictor approach to untangle changes, we show that on average at least 16.6 % of all source files are incorrectly associated with bug reports. These incorrect bug file associations seem to not significantly impact models classifying source files to have at least one bug or no bugs. But our experiments show that untangling tangled code changes can result in more accurate regression bug prediction models when compared to models trained and tested on tangled bug datasets—in our experiments, the statistically significant accuracy improvements lies between 5 % and 200 %. We recommend better change organization to limit the impact of tangled changes.