Toward Extended Change Types for Analyzing Software Faults

This research extends an existing source code change taxonomy that was designed to analyze change coupling. The extension expands change types related to statements in order to achieve more granular data about the type of statement that is changed. The extended taxonomy is evaluated to determine if it can be applied to software fault analysis. We found that the extended change types occur consistently and with high frequency in fault fixes for Eclipse 2.0 and 3.0. Faults were then clustered according to the source code changes and analyzed. We found that the types and sizes of clusters are highly correlated, indicating some consistency in the patterns of the fault fixes. Finally, we performed an initial investigation to determine whether faults in the same cluster have similar characteristics. Our results indicate that many of the change types can be used to characterize the type of fault that has been fixed. However, some of the change types obfuscate the true nature of the fix. Ideas for improving the taxonomy based on these findings are provided.