Non-Essential Changes in Version Histories
Staff - Faculty of Informatics
Start date: 12 April 2011
End date: 13 April 2011
SPEAKER: Prof. Martin Robillard, McGill University, Canada
DATE: Tuesday, April 12th 2011
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room Si-008, Black building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30
ABSTRACT:
Numerous techniques involve mining change data captured in software archives to assist engineering efforts, for example to identify components that tend to evolve together. We observed that important changes to software artifacts are sometimes accompanied by numerous non-essential modifications, such as local variable refactorings, or textual differences induced as part of a rename refactoring. We developed a tool-supported technique for detecting non-essential code differences in the revision histories of software systems. We used our technique to investigate code changes in over 24 000 change sets gathered from the change histories of seven long-lived open-source systems. We found that up to 15.5% of a system's method updates were due solely to non-essential differences. We also report on numerous observations on the distribution of non-essential differences in change history and their potential impact on change-based analyses.
BIO:
Martin Robillard is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, where he heads the the Software Evolution Research Group (SWEVO). His current research focuses on the automated analysis of software development artifacts to support software evolution and maintenance. He is the recipient of four ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards and two IBM Innovation Awards. He is currently serving as the Program Co-Chair for the 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, and previously served on the program committees of numerous software engineering conferences including the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia and a B.Eng. from École Polytechnique de Montréal. Robillard is on sabbatical in Germany and Switzerland for the 2011 calendar year.
HOST: Prof. Michele Lanza
