Ahmed E. Hassan
ABSTRACT
Source control systems permit developers to attach a free form message to every committed change. The content of these change messages can support software maintenance activities. We present an automated approach to classify a change message as either a bug fix, a feature introduction, or a general maintenance change. Researchers can study the evolution of project using our classification. For example, researchers can monitor the rate of bug fixes in a project without having access to bug reporting databases like Bugzilla.
A case study using change messages from several open source projects, shows that our approach produces results similar to a manual classifications performed by professional developers. These findings are similar to ones reported by Mockus and Votta for commercial projects.
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Index Terms
- Automated classification of change messages in open source projects
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