Mining Code Commits for Enhanced Software Quality

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Ubisoft, one of Canada's largest video game development companies, specializes in the design andimplementation of high-budget video games such as Prince of Persia, Far Cry and Assassin's Creed. Thecompany is heavily invested in software development and maintenance tasks. Currently, Ubisoft's developersrely mainly on code reviews and traditional testing techniques to assess the quality of their systems. To reducecosts while preserving quality, Ubisoft's management wants to explore other software quality controltechniques, especially those that can detect or even prevent the insertion of defects, preferably, before systemmodifications reach the central software repository.The main goal of this project is to develop an approach and a tool for preventing software developers frominserting commits that may lead to buggy code. Our approach will leverage years of historical commit data todetect whether a new commit is potentially a defect-introducing commit or not. The objectives of this Engageproject are three-fold: (a) To investigate the use of historical commits as a core technology for use in thedetection of potential defects that may be introduced through the commit mechanism, (b) To design andimplement the necessary interfaces to embed our approach with Ubisoft code management systems, and (c) Toevaluate the new approach by applying it to Ubisoft software projects and by gathering feedback from Ubisoftdevelopers.The proposed research project will benefit Ubisoft by providing a sound mechanism for building reliablesystems at lower costs. The time saved from detecting and fixing defects can be shifted to the development ofnew functionalities that add value to Ubisoft customers. This project may lead to future extended research intopractical approaches that leverage commits as a core technology for software quality control. Furthermore, theproposed project and its subsequent projects will train several HQPs who will contribute to the growth ofCanada's software industry-an important enabler to Canada's competitiveness in the world economy.