Are suggestions of coupled file changes interesting?

Abstract

Software repositories include information which can be made available for bug fixing or maintenance using repository mining. The identification of coupled changes have been proposed several times. Yet, existing studies focus on the found couplings and ignore feedback from developers. We investigate three development projects and their repositories to find files that frequently change together to support the software developers. We complement the coupled files information with details from the issue tracking system and the project documentation. We contrast our findings with feedback from the developers about how interesting our findings are for them. We found that the small size of the repositories made an insightful analysis difficult. The response to coupled changes both from experienced and inexperienced developers was mostly neutral. They accepted most of the additional attributes we presented. Furthermore, developers also suggested other additional issues to be relevant, e.g. the context of the coupled changes and the way they are presented, which we did not cover in this study. Therefore, coupled change analysis research will need to take the presentation and context information into account.