On the Evolutionary Relationship between Change Coupling and Fix-Inducing Changes

Abstract

Change Coupling (CC) is the implicit relation formed between two or more changing software artifacts (e.g. source code). These artifacts are found to have design issues and code smells. Existing research has revealed the relationship between the change coupled relation of a class with the number of bugs in bug repositories. However, this ignored their true relation at the creation time of bugs or erroneous changes known as Fix-Inducing Changes (FIC). This paper tries to find the actual relationship between FIC and change coupled relations with respect to considering recent and all commits. This is done by traversing the entire history of a repository with a commit window of 100 commits and collecting data about FICs and metrics related to change coupling and object oriented system. It is found from the analysis that recent CC relations at the time of error are more correlated with new errors. Besides, it is found that explanatory power for predicting future erroneous change is more in recent CC relation than the one formed by considering all commits starting from the 1st commit.