Pârţachi, Profir-Petru;
White, David R;
Barr, Earl T;
(2023)
Aide-mémoire: Improving a Project’s Collective Memory via Pull Request–Issue Links.
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
, 32
(2)
pp. 1-36.
10.1145/3542937.
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Abstract
Links between pull request and the issues they address document and accelerate the development of a software project but are often omitted. We present a new tool, Aide-mémoire, to suggest such links when a developer submits a pull request or closes an issue, smoothly integrating into existing workflows. In contrast to previous state-of-the-art approaches that repair related commit histories, Aide-mémoire is designed for continuous, real-time, and long-term use, employing Mondrian forest to adapt over a project’s lifetime and continuously improve traceability. Aide-mémoire is tailored for two specific instances of the general traceability problem—namely, commit to issue and pull request to issue links, with a focus on the latter—and exploits data inherent to these two problems to outperform tools for general purpose link recovery. Our approach is online, language-agnostic, and scalable. We evaluate over a corpus of 213 projects and six programming languages, achieving a mean average precision of 0.95. Adopting Aide-mémoire is both efficient and effective: A programmer need only evaluate a single suggested link 94% of the time, and 16% of all discovered links were originally missed by developers.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Aide-mémoire: Improving a Project’s Collective Memory via Pull Request–Issue Links |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1145/3542937 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1145/3542937 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10168937 |
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