An empirical study of fine-grained software modifications

Software is typically improved and modified in small increments. These changes are usually stored in a configuration management or version control system and can be retrieved. We retrieved each individual modification made to a mature software project and proceeded to analyze them. We studied the characteristics of these modification requests (MRs), the interrelationships of the files that compose them, and their authors. We propose several metrics to quantify MRs, and use these metrics to create visualization graphs that can be used to understand the interrelationships.