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Record W3157562347 · doi:10.1007/s10664-020-09926-4

The nature of build changes

2021· article· en· W3157562347 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEmpirical Software Engineering · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceDependency (UML)JavaPlug-inSoftware evolutionSoftware maintenanceSoftware engineeringSoftwareLegacy systemSoftware systemProgramming languageSoftware construction

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Build systems are an essential part of modern software projects. As software projects change continuously, it is crucial to understand how the build system changes because neglecting its maintenance can, at best, lead to expensive build breakage, or at worst, introduce user-reported defects due to incorrectly compiled, linked, packaged, or deployed official releases. Recent studies have investigated the (co-)evolution of build configurations and reasons for build breakage; however, the prior analysis focused on a coarse-grained outcome ( i.e. , either build changing or not). In this paper, we present BuildDiff , an approach to extract detailed build changes from Maven build files and classify them into 143 change types. In a manual evaluation of 400 build-changing commits, we show that BuildDiff can extract and classify build changes with average precision, recall, and f1-scores of 0.97, 0.98, and 0.97, respectively. We then present two studies using the build changes extracted from 144 open source Java projects to study the frequency and time of build changes. The results show that the top-10 most frequent change types account for 51% of the build changes. Among them, changes to version numbers and changes to dependencies of the projects occur most frequently. We also observe frequently co-occurring changes, such as changes to the source code management definitions, and corresponding changes to the dependency management system and the dependency declaration. Furthermore, our results show that build changes frequently occur around release days. In particular, critical changes, such as updates to plugin configuration parts and dependency insertions, are performed before a release day. The contributions of this paper lay in the foundation for future research, such as for analyzing the (co-)evolution of build files with other artifacts, improving effort estimation approaches by incorporating necessary modifications to the build system specification, or automatic repair approaches for configuration code. Furthermore, our detailed change information enables improvements of refactoring approaches for build configurations and improvements of prediction models to identify error-prone build files.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.795
Threshold uncertainty score0.751

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.281
Teacher spread0.266 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it