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The Birth, Growth, Death and Rejuvenation of Software Maintenance Communities
Conference proceeding   Open access

The Birth, Growth, Death and Rejuvenation of Software Maintenance Communities

Qiong Feng, Yuanfang Cai, Rick Kazman, Ran Mo and ACM
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 12TH ACM/IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND MEASUREMENT (ESEM 2018)
01 Jan 2018
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3239235.3239246View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze) Open

Abstract

Computer Science Computer Science, Software Engineering Computer Science, Theory & Methods Science & Technology Technology
Background: Though much research has been conducted to investigate software maintenance activities, there has been little work charactering maintenance files as a community and exploring the evolution of this community. Aims: The goal of our research is to identify maintenance communities and monitor their evolution-birth, growth, death and rejuvenation. Method: In this paper, we leveraged a social community detection algorithm-clique prelocation method (CPM)-to identify file communities. Then we implemented an algorithm to detect new communities, active communities, inactive communities and reactivated communities by cumulatively detecting and constantly comparing communities in time sequences. Results: Based on our analysis of 14 open-source projects, we found that new communities are mostly caused by bug and improvement issues. An active community can be vigorous, on and off, through the entire life of a system, and so does an inactive community. In addition, an inactive community can be reactivated again, mostly through bug issues. Conclusions: These findings add to our understanding of software maintenance communities and help us identify the most expensive maintenance spots by identifying constantly active communities.

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Software Engineering
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
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