A Method for the Identification of Logical Dependencies

Logical dependencies refer to implicit relationships established among software artifacts that make them frequently change together throughout the software development process. Research in global software development has shown that such dependencies influence the quality of software systems and the coordination needs among developers and teams in software development. Properly identifying logical dependencies is thus important. However, several challenges in this topic remain open and must be overcome, such as finding more adequate ways to group related commits and to filter out irrelevant dependencies. Driven by these factors, the goal of the candidate´s PhD thesis is to conceive, implement, and evaluate an effective method for logical dependencies identification. Preliminary results have shown that the initial version of our proposed method is feasible even in large scale scenarios and that it is also able to group related commits in atomic-commit-featured version control systems.