Mining Code Commits for Enhanced Software Quality

育碧是加拿大最大的视频游戏开发公司之一，专门设计和实现高预算的视频游戏，如波斯王子、远哭和刺客信条。该公司在软件开发和维护任务上投入了大量资金。目前，育碧的开发人员主要依靠代码审查和传统测试技术来评估其系统的质量。为了在保持质量的同时减少成本，育碧管理层希望探索其他软件质量控制技术，特别是那些可以检测甚至防止缺陷插入的技术，最好是在系统修改到达中央软件库之前。该项目的主要目标是开发一种方法和工具，以防止软件开发人员提交可能导致错误代码的提交。我们的方法将利用多年的历史提交数据来检测新提交是否潜在地是引入缺陷的提交。该Engage项目的目标有三个：(A)调查历史提交作为核心技术的使用，用于检测可能通过提交机制引入的潜在缺陷；(B)设计和实现必要的接口，将我们的方法嵌入育碧代码管理系统；以及(C)通过将新方法应用于育碧软件项目并收集育碧开发人员的反馈，对新方法进行评估。拟议的研究项目将为育碧以更低的成本构建可靠的系统提供完善的机制，从而使育碧受益。检测和修复缺陷所节省的时间可以转移到为育碧客户增加价值的新功能的开发上。该项目可能导致未来对利用提交作为软件质量控制的核心技术的实际方法的扩展研究。此外，拟议的项目及其后续项目将培训几名HQP，他们将为加拿大软件行业的增长做出贡献--这是加拿大在世界经济中竞争力的重要推动因素。

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.