Understanding and visualizing fine-grained software modifications

软件维护和发展是非常昂贵的，知道需要执行哪些更改才能完成任务需要时间和经验。这项研究的目标是确定软件系统开发人员应用于软件系统的更改的特征。这项研究项目将定义衡量标准，以评估修改执行的“改变”的数量，并为我们观察到的不同类型的改变创建一个本体。我们将开发新的算法，在这个本体的框架内对给定的改变进行自动分类。这种分析方法将使我们能够更清楚地识别软件演化中不同更改的相对重要性。我们建议，可以通过加权某些类型的更改的重要性来改进以前使用历史信息的研究。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(在时间和金钱上)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.