Hey! are you committing tangled changes?

Abstract

Although there is a principle that states a commit should only include changes for a single task, it is not always respected by developers. This means that code repositories often include commits that contain tangled changes. The presence of such tangled changes hinders analyzing code repositories because most mining software repository (MSR) approaches are designed with the assumption that every commit includes only changes for a single task. In this paper, we propose a technique to inform developers that they are in the process of committing tangled changes. The proposed technique utilizes the changes included in the past commits to judge whether a given commit includes tangled changes. If it determines that the proposed commit may include tangled changes, it offers suggestions on how the tangled changes can be split into a set of untangled changes.