Recommending change clusters to support software investigation: an empirical study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract During software maintenance tasks, developers often spend a valuable amount of effort investigating source code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to help developers navigate the source code effectively. We studied to what extent developers can benefit from information contained in clusters of change sets to guide their investigation of a software system. We defined change clusters as groups of change sets that have a certain amount of elements in common. Our analysis of 4200 change sets for seven different systems and covering a cumulative time span of over 17 years of development showed that less than one in five tasks overlapped with change clusters. Furthermore, a detailed qualitative analysis of the results revealed that only 13% of the clusters associated with applicable change tasks were likely to be useful. We conclude that change clusters can only support a minority of change tasks, and should only be recommended if it is possible to do so at minimal cost to the developers. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.024 | 0.227 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".