Supporting software evolution using adaptive change propagation heuristics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When changing a source code entity (e.g., a function), developers must ensure that the change is propagated to related entities to avoid the introduction of bugs. Accurate change propagation is essential for the successful evolution of complex software systems. Techniques and tools are needed to support developers in propagating changes. Several heuristics have been proposed in the past for change propagation. Research shows that heuristics based on the change history of a project outperform heuristics based on the dependency graph. However, these heuristics being static are not the answer to the dynamic nature of software projects. These heuristics need to adapt to the dynamic nature of software projects and must adjust themselves for the peculiarities of each changed entity. In this paper we propose adaptive change propagation heuristics. These heuristics are metaheuristics that combine various previously researched heuristics to improve the overall performance (precision and recall) of change propagation heuristics. Through an empirical case study, using four large open source systems; GCC (a compiler), FreeBSD (an operating system), PostgreSQL (a database), and GCluster (a clustering framework), we demonstrate that our adaptive change propagation heuristics show a 57% statistically significant improvement over the top-performing static change propagation heuristics.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".