Mining Cross-Task Artifact Dependencies from Developer Interactions

Abstract

Implementing a change is a challenging task in complex, safety-critical, or long-living software systems. Developers need to identify which artifacts are affected to correctly and completely implement a change. Changes often require editing artifacts across the software system to the extent that several developers need to be involved. Crucially, a developer needs to know which artifacts under someone else's control have impact on her work task and, in turn, how her changes cascade to other artifacts, again, under someone else's control. These cross-task dependencies are especially important as they are a common cause of incomplete and incorrect change propagation and require explicit coordination. Along these lines the core research question in this paper is: how can we automatically detect crosstask dependencies and use them to assist the developer? We introduce an approach for mining such dependencies from past developer interactions with engineering artifacts as the basis for live recommending artifacts during change implementation. We show that our approach lists 67% of the correctly recommended artifacts within the top-10 results with real interaction data and tasks from the Mylyn project. The results demonstrate we are able to successfully find not only cross-task dependencies but also provide them to developers in a useful manner. Index Terms-cross-task dependencies, change impact assessment, developer interactions, software artifacts recommendation, Mylyn, Bugzilla.

A Critique on Task Allocation Processes in Distributed Agile Software Development

“…Identified categories of factors and categories of dependencies are not properly considered before task allocation in any presented work. Challenges/ risks are identified in [24,81,95] and [8, 13, 16, 18-20, 55, 76].…”

“…For a better understanding of task allocation, factors are identified in proposed researches [1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13, 15, 18-25, 28, 29, 32-34, 38, 40, 42-46, 51-55, 65-69, 71-74, 79, 80] and [82,83,85,87,[90][91][92][93][94][95].…”

“…ese task requirements must be identified timely to overcome later issues of development. Some task requirements are identified, for example, task complexity [6, 14-16, 20-25, 55, 58, 65, 79], task type [6, 13, 15, 19, 22-25, 30, 36, 41, 55, 65, 67, 78, 84, 95], task with the strict timeline [30], required budget [14], required skills [4, 6, 13-15, 23, 24, 24, 30, 34, 35, 44, 65, 81, 84], coupling between tasks [4,6,9,13,14,28,34,35,37,44,54,55,65,68,73,80,81,85,89,95], deadline [34], required resources [34], required effort [14,20,24,24,34], task size [6,28,30,68]…”

ConE: A Concurrent Edit Detection Tool for Large-scale Software Development

“…Ashraf et al presented reports from mining cross-task artifact dependencies from developer interactions [3]. Dias et al proposed methods to understanding predictive factors for merge conflicts [21], i.e., how conflict occurrence is affected by technical and organizational factors.…”

“…Dias et al proposed methods to understanding predictive factors for merge conflicts [21], i.e., how conflict occurrence is affected by technical and organizational factors. Studies conducted by Blincoe et al and Cataldo et al [3,16] show the importance of timely and efficient recommendations and the implications for the design of collaboration awareness tools. Studies like this form a basis for building solutions that are scalable and responsive (the large-scale ConE service that we deployed at Microsoft) and their importance in creating awareness of the potential conflicts.…”