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Record W4395464644 · doi:10.1145/3661484

A Meta-Study of Software-Change Intentions

2024· review· en· W4395464644 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

VenueACM Computing Surveys · 2024
Typereview
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British ColumbiaUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsComputer scienceSoftwareSoftware engineeringProgramming language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

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)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.982
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0050.006
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 head0.338
GPT teacher head0.408
Teacher spread0.069 · 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