@article{14757,
  keywords = {evolutionary coupling, change impact analysis, association rule mining, parameter tuning},
  author = {Leon Moonen and Thomas Rolfsnes and David Binkley and Stefano Di Alesio},
  title = {What are the Effects of History Length and Age on Mining Software Change Impact?},
  abstract = {The goal of Software Change Impact Analysis is to identify artifacts(typically source-code files or individual methods therein) potentiallyaffected by a change.  Recently, there has been increased interestin mining software change impact based on evolutionary coupling.A particularly promising approach uses association rule mining touncover potentially affected artifacts from patterns in the system{\textquoteright}schange history.  Two main considerations when using this approachare the history length, the number of transactions from the changehistory used to identify the impact of a change, and history age,the number of transactions that have occurred since patterns werelast mined from the history.  Although history length and age cansignificantly affect the quality of mining results, few guidelinesexist on how to best select appropriate values for these twoparameters.In this paper, we empirically investigate the effects of historylength and age on the quality of change impact analysis using minedevolutionary coupling.  Specifically, we report on a series ofsystematic experiments using three state-of-the-art mining algorithmsthat involve the change histories of two large industrial systemsand 17 large open source systems.  In these experiments, we varythe length and age of the history used to mine software changeimpact, and assess how this affects precision and applicability.Results from the study are used to derive practical guidelines forchoosing history length and age when applying association rulemining to conduct software change impact analysis.},
  year = {2018},
  journal = {Journal of Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE)},
  volume = {23},
  pages = {2362-2397},
  month = {03/2018},
  publisher = {Springer},
  issn = {1382-3256},
  url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10664-017-9588-z},
  doi = {10.1007/s10664-017-9588-z},
}