Are coupled file changes suggestions useful?

4 Background. Software maintenance is an important activity in the 5 process of software engineering where over time maintenance team mem6 bers leave and new members join. The identification of files being changes 7 together frequently has been proposed several times. Yet, existing studies 8 about these file changes ignore the feedback from developers as well as 9 the impact on the performance of maintenance and rely on the analysis 10 findings and expert evaluation. 11 Methods. We conducted an experiment with the goal to investigate 12 the usefulness of coupled file changes during maintenance tasks when de13 velopers are inexperienced in programming or when they are new on the 14 project. Using data mining on software repositories we can identify files 15 that changed most frequently together in the past. We extract coupled 16 file changes from the Git repository of a Java software system and join 17 them with corresponding attributes from the versioning and issue tracking 18 system and the project documentation. We present a controlled experi19 ment involving 36 student participants where we investigate if coupled file 20 change suggestions influence the correctness of the task solutions and the 21 time to complete them. 22 Results. The results show that coupled file change suggestions sig23 nificantly increase the correctness of the solutions. However, there is only 24 a small effect on the time to complete the tasks. We also derived a set of 25 the most useful attributes based on the developers feedback. 26 Discussion. Coupled file changes and a limited number of the pro27 posed attributes are useful for inexperienced developers working on main28 tenance tasks whereby although the developers using these suggestions 29 solved more tasks, they still need time to organize and understand and 30 implement this information. 31 ∗Corr. author: Jasmin Ramadani, Universitätsstr. 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, phone +49 711 685 884306, [email protected]