Paper Info
Title
How Developers Drive Software Evolution
Abstract
As systems evolve their structure change in ways not expected upfront. As time goes by, the knowledge of the developers becomes more and more critical for the process of understanding the system. That is, when we want to understand a certain issue of the system we ask the knowledgeable developers. Yet, in large systems, not every developer is knowledgeable in all the details of the system. Thus, we would want to know which developer is knowledgeable in the issue at hand. In this paper we make use of the mapping between the changes and the author identifiers (e.g., user names) provided by versioning repositories. We first define a measurement for the notion of code ownership. We use this measurement to define the Ownership Map visualization to understand when and how different developers interacted in which way and in which part of the system1. We report the results we obtained on several large systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1109/IWPSE.2005.21
IWPSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
different developer,author identifiers,versioning repository,software evolution,large system,software visualization,knowledgeable developer,user name,reverse engineering,certain issue,structure change,ownership map visualization,development process,developers drive software evolution,code ownership,software maintenance,structural change
Personal software process,Software engineering,Systems engineering,Software analytics,Computer science,Software documentation,Software system,Backporting,Software visualization,Software development,Social software engineering
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-2349-8
79
3.56
References 
Authors
21
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tudor Girba172940.01
Adrian Kuhn241618.19
Mauricio Seeberger3814.15
Stéphane Ducasse43418243.15