Mining Software Change History in an Industrial Environment

Version control systems are among the type of repositories that are frequently explored as sources of software change history. They can be mined to identify associations between software module modifications. This information is useful to support software modification activities, indicating to software engineers which modules are usually modified together during software maintenance or evolution. Previous works published on the subject focused on mining associations from open source software projects. This article presents the use of association mining in an industrial environment. The study was set up as a formal experiment and studied 18 systems developed in a large Brazilian beverage company. The results show that the precision of the rules obtained in this environment are even higher than its counterpart obtained in open source projects. This suggests that this approach is very useful in this type of environment.