Code change sniffer: Predicting future code changes with Markov chain

Abstract

Code changes are one of the essential processes of software evolution. These changes are performed to fix bugs, improve quality of software, and provide a better user experience. However, such changes made in code could lead to ripple effects that can cause unwanted behavior. To prevent such issues occurring after code changes, code change prediction, change impact analysis techniques are used. The proposed approach uses static call information, forward slicing, and method change information to build a Markov chain, which provides a prediction for code changes in the near future commits. For static call information, we utilized and compared call graph and effect graph. We performed an evaluation on five open-source projects from GitHub that varies between 5K-26K lines of code. To measure the effectiveness of our proposed approach, recall, precision, and f-measure metrics have been used on five open-source projects. The results show that the Markov chain that is based on call graph can have higher precision compared to effect graph. On the other hand, for small number of cases higher recall values are obtained with effect graph compared to call graph. With a Markov chain model based on call graph and effect graph, we can achieve recall values between 98%-100%. © 2021 IEEE.