Supporting software evolution using adaptive change propagation heuristics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it