A major aspect of maintaining the quality of software systems is the management of bugs. Bugs are commonly fixed in a corrective manner; detected after the code is tested or reported in production. Analyzing Fix-Inducing Changes (FIC) — developer code that introduces bugs — provides the opportunity to estimate these bugs proactively. This study analyzes the evolution of FICs to visualize patterns associated with the introduction of bugs throughout and within project releases. Furthermore, the association between FICs and complexity metrics, an important element of software evolution, is extracted to quantify the characteristics of buggy code. The findings indicate that FICs become less frequent as the software evolves and more commonly appear in the early stages of individual releases. It is also observed that FICs are correlated to longer Commit intervals. Lastly, FICs are found to be more present in codes with fewer lines and less cyclomatic complexity, which corresponds with the law of growing complexity in software evolution.
Analyzing Fix-Inducing Changes (developer code that introduce bugs) provides the opportunity to estimate bugs beforehand. This study analyzes the evolution of FICs to visualize patterns associated with the introduction of bugs throughout and within project releases.
Software repository mining, Data mining
