In a manual examination of more than 7,000 issue reports from the bug databases of five open-source projects, we found 33.8% of all issue reports to be misclassified, that is, rather than referring to a code fix, they resulted in a new feature, an update to documentation, or an internal refactoring. This misclassification introduces bias […]

Software reliability is heavily impacted by soft- ware changes. How do these changes relate to each other? By analyzing the impacted method definitions and usages, we determine dependencies between changes, resulting in a change genealogy that captures how earlier changes enable and cause later ones. Model checking this genealogy reveals temporal process patterns that encode […]

Several defect prediction models have been proposed to identify which entities in a software system are likely to have defects before its release. This paper presents a replication of one such study conducted by Zimmermann and Nagappan [1] on Windows Server 2003 where the authors leveraged dependency relationships between software entities captured using social network […]

Changing source code in large software systems is complex and requires a good understanding of dependencies between software components. Modification to components with little regard to dependencies may have an adverse impact on the quality of the latter, i.e., increase their risk to fail. We conduct an empirical study to understand the relationship between the […]