Understanding and visualizing fine-grained software modifications

软件维护和发展是非常昂贵的，并且知道需要执行哪些更改来完成任务需要时间和经验。本研究的目的是识别由开发人员应用于软件系统的变更的特征。这个研究项目将定义度量来评估由修改执行的“变更”的数量，并创建我们观察到的不同类型变更的本体。算法将被开发出来，在这个本体的框架内对给定的变化进行自动分类。这种分析方法将允许我们更清楚地辨别软件演进中不同变化的相对重要性。我们建议，以前使用历史信息的研究可以通过对某些类型变化的重要性进行加权来改进。最后，我们将继续努力开发软件系统历史信息的有用可视化。我相信这里提出的研究将通过减少维护成本（时间和金钱），并提高他们生产的软件的整体质量，直接使软件开发人员（及其公司）受益。

Software maintenance and evolution is very expensive and knowing what changes need to be performed to complete a task takes time and experience. The objective of this research is to identify the characteristics of changes applied to software systems by their developers. This research project will define metrics to evaluate the amount of "change" performed by a modification, and create an ontology of the different types of changes that we observe.  Algorithms will be developed to automatically classify a given change within the framework of this ontology. This method of analysis will allow us to more clearly discern the relative importance of different changes in software evolution. We propose that previous studies using historical information can be improved through a weighting of the importance of certain types of changes.  Finally, we will continue our efforts to develop useful visualizations of the historical information of a software system. I believe that the research proposed herein will directly benefit software developers (and their companies) by reducing the cost (in time and money) of maintenance, and improve the overall quality of the software they produce.