5 research outputs found
Untangling Fine-Grained Code Changes
After working for some time, developers commit their code changes to a
version control system. When doing so, they often bundle unrelated changes
(e.g., bug fix and refactoring) in a single commit, thus creating a so-called
tangled commit. Sharing tangled commits is problematic because it makes review,
reversion, and integration of these commits harder and historical analyses of
the project less reliable. Researchers have worked at untangling existing
commits, i.e., finding which part of a commit relates to which task. In this
paper, we contribute to this line of work in two ways: (1) A publicly available
dataset of untangled code changes, created with the help of two developers who
accurately split their code changes into self contained tasks over a period of
four months; (2) a novel approach, EpiceaUntangler, to help developers share
untangled commits (aka. atomic commits) by using fine-grained code change
information. EpiceaUntangler is based and tested on the publicly available
dataset, and further evaluated by deploying it to 7 developers, who used it for
2 weeks. We recorded a median success rate of 91% and average one of 75%, in
automatically creating clusters of untangled fine-grained code changes