On the Use of Process Trails to Understand Software Development

Abstract

Software repositories, such as version control systems (CVS) and bug-tracking systems (Bugzilla), provide useful information about software process trails left by developers during the evolution of a software project. Mining these repositories provides a way to understand software development, to support predictions about software development, and to plan various aspects of software projects. We introduce three cases in the areas of impact analysis, change request assignment, and crosscutting concern mining, that takes benefit from historical information and show that the combination of different type of analyses can improve the performance of these software engineering models