Revisiting the Effect of Branch Handling Strategies on Change Recommendation

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Abstract

Although literature has noted the effects of branch handling strategies on change recommendation based on evolutionary coupling, they have been tested in a limited experimental setting. Additionally, the branches characteristics that lead to these effects have not been investigated. In this study, we revisited the investigation conducted by Kovalenko et al. on the effect to change recommendation using two different branch handling strategies: including changesets from commits on a branch and excluding them. In addition to the setting by Kovalenko et al., we introduced another setting to compare: extracting a changeset for a branch from a merge commit at once. We compared the change recommendation results and the similarity of the extracted co-changes to those in the future obtained using two strategies through 30 open-source software systems. The results show that handling commits on a branch separately is often more appropriate in change recommendation, although the comparison in an additional setting resulted in a balanced performance among the branch handling strategies. Additionally, we found that the merge commit size and the branch length positively influence the change recommendation results.

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This work builds on

• Technical Meeting 共変更に基づく変更推薦に対するブランチ戦略の影響分析 情報処理学会研究報告, 2021

BibTeX

@inproceedings{k_isemoto-icpc2022,
    author = {Keisuke Isemoto and Takashi Kobayashi and Shinpei Hayashi},
    title = {Revisiting the Effect of Branch Handling Strategies on Change Recommendation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension},
    pages = {162--172},
    doi = {10.1145/3524610.3527870},
    year = 2022,
}