Understanding and visualizing fine-grained software modifications

软件的维护和演化是非常昂贵的，并且知道需要执行哪些更改来完成任务需要时间和经验。这项研究的目的是确定的特点，应用到软件系统的开发人员的变化。这个研究项目将定义度量来评估修改所执行的“更改”量，并创建我们观察到的不同类型更改的本体。 将开发算法，以自动分类在这个本体的框架内的给定的变化。这种分析方法将使我们能够更清楚地辨别软件演化中不同变化的相对重要性。我们建议，以前的研究使用历史信息可以通过加权的重要性，某些类型的变化得到改善。 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。我相信本文提出的研究将通过降低维护成本（时间和金钱）直接使软件开发人员（及其公司）受益，并提高他们生产的软件的整体质量。

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.