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Can Commit Change History Reveal Potential Fault Prone Classes? A Study on GitHub Repositories

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Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1077))

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Abstract

Various studies had successfully utilized graph theory analysis as a way to gain a high-level abstraction view of the software systems, such as constructing the call graph to visualize the dependencies among software components. The level of granularity and information shown by the graph usually depends on the input such as variable, method, class, package, or combination of multiple levels. However, there are very limited studies that investigated how software evolution and change history can be used as a basis to model software-based complex network. It is a common understanding that stable and well-designed source code will have less update throughout a software development lifecycle. It is only those code that were badly design tend to get updated due to broken dependencies, high coupling, or dependencies with other classes. This paper put forward an approach to model a commit change-based weighted complex network based on historical software change and evolution data captured from GitHub repositories with the aim to identify potential fault prone classes. Four well-established graph centrality metrics were used as a proxy metric to discover fault prone classes. Experiments on ten open-source projects discovered that when all centrality metrics are used together, it can yield reasonably good precision when compared against the ground truth.

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Acknowledgement

This work was carried out within the framework of the research project FP001-2016 under the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme provided by Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology, Monash University Malaysia, Jalan Lagoon Selatan, 47500, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia

    Chun Yong Chong

  2. Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Sai Peck Lee

Authors
  1. Chun Yong Chong
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  2. Sai Peck Lee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chun Yong Chong .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information Systems Group, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Marten van Sinderen

  2. Wrocław University of Economics, Wrocław, Poland

    Leszek A. Maciaszek

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Chong, C.Y., Lee, S.P. (2019). Can Commit Change History Reveal Potential Fault Prone Classes? A Study on GitHub Repositories. In: van Sinderen, M., Maciaszek, L. (eds) Software Technologies. ICSOFT 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1077. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29157-0_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29157-0_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29156-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29157-0

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