Towards Understanding Large-Scale Adaptive Changes from Version Histories

A case study of three open source systems undergoing large adaptive maintenance tasks is presented. The adaptive maintenance task involves migrating each system to a new version of a third party API. The changes to support the migration were spread out over multiple years for each system. The first two systems are both part of KDE, namely KOffice and Extragear/graphics. The adaptive maintenance task, for both systems, involves migrating to a new version of Qt. The third system is OpenSceneGraph that underwent a migration to a new version of OpenGL. The case study involves sifting through tens of thousands of commits to identify only those commits involved in the specific adaptive maintenance task. The object is to develop a data set that will be used for developing automated methods to identify/characterize adaptive maintenance commits.