A Meta-Study of Software-Change Intentions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Every software system undergoes changes, for example, to add new features, fix bugs, or refactor code. The importance of understanding software changes has been widely recognized, resulting in various techniques and studies, for instance, on change-impact analysis or classifying developers’ activities. Since changes are triggered by developers’ intentions—something they plan or want to change in the system—many researchers have studied intentions behind changes. While there appears to be a consensus among software-engineering researchers and practitioners that knowing the intentions behind software changes is important, it is not clear how developers can actually benefit from this knowledge. In fact, there is no consolidated, recent overview of the state of the art on software-change intentions (SCIs) and their relevance for software engineering. We present a meta-study of 122 publications, which we used to derive a categorization of SCIs and to discuss motivations, evidence, and techniques relating to SCIs. Unfortunately, we found that individual pieces of research are often disconnected from each other, because a common understanding is missing. Similarly, some publications showcase the potential of knowing SCIs, but more substantial research to understand the practical benefits of knowing SCIs is needed. Our contributions can help researchers and practitioners improve their understanding of SCIs and how SCIs can aid software engineering tasks.
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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 | 0.029 | 0.142 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".