TY - GEN
T1 - Software history under the lens
T2 - 31st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2015
AU - Codoban, Mihai
AU - Ragavan, Sruti Srinivasa
AU - Dig, Danny
AU - Bailey, Brian
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2015/11/19
Y1 - 2015/11/19
N2 - Despite software history being indispensable for developers, there is little empirical knowledge about how they examine software history. Without such knowledge, researchers and tool builders are in danger of making wrong assumptions and building inadequate tools. In this paper we present an in-depth empirical study about the motivations developers have for examining software history, the strategies they use, and the challenges they encounter. To learn these, we interviewed 14 experienced developers from industry, and then extended our findings by surveying 217 developers. We found that history does not begin with the latest commit but with uncommitted changes. Moreover, we found that developers had different motivations for examining recent and old history. Based on these findings we propose 3-LENS HISTORY, a novel unified model for reasoning about software history.
AB - Despite software history being indispensable for developers, there is little empirical knowledge about how they examine software history. Without such knowledge, researchers and tool builders are in danger of making wrong assumptions and building inadequate tools. In this paper we present an in-depth empirical study about the motivations developers have for examining software history, the strategies they use, and the challenges they encounter. To learn these, we interviewed 14 experienced developers from industry, and then extended our findings by surveying 217 developers. We found that history does not begin with the latest commit but with uncommitted changes. Moreover, we found that developers had different motivations for examining recent and old history. Based on these findings we propose 3-LENS HISTORY, a novel unified model for reasoning about software history.
KW - human aspects of software evolution
KW - software change management
KW - software history
KW - user studies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84961589844&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84961589844&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332446
DO - 10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332446
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84961589844
T3 - 2015 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2015 - Proceedings
SP - 1
EP - 10
BT - 2015 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2015 - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 29 September 2015 through 1 October 2015
ER -