Evaluation of Semantic Interference Detection in Parallel Changes: an Exploratory Experiment

Parallel developments are becoming increasingly prevalent in the building and evolution of large-scale software systems. Our previous studies of a large industrial project showed that there was a linear correlation between the degree of parallelism and the likelihood of defects in the changes. To further study the relationship between parallel changes and faults, we have designed and implemented an algorithm to detect “direct” semantic interference between parallel changes. To evaluate the analyzer’s effectiveness in fault prediction, we designed an experiment in the context of an industrial project. We first mine the change and version management repositories to find sample versions sets of different degrees of parallelism. We investigate the interference between the versions with our analyzer. We then mine the change and version repositories to find out what faults were discovered subsequent to the analyzed interfering versions. We use the match rate between semantic interfere...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Danhua Shao, Sarfraz Khurshid, Dewayne E. Perry
• Keywords: ICSM 2007, Parallel Changes, Semantic Interference, Semantic Interference Analyzer, Software Engineering