Supporting software maintenance by mining software update records

Abstract

This paper describes the application of inductive methods to data extracted from both source code and software maintenance records. We would like to extract relations that indicate which files in, a legacy system, are relevant to each other in the context of program maintenance. We call these relations maintenance relevance relations. Such a relation could reveal existing complex interconnections among files in the system, which may in turn be useful in comprehending them. We discuss the methodology we employed to extract and evaluate the relations. We also point out some of the problems we encountered and our solutions for them. Finally, we present some of the results that we have obtained.