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Background: Bots help automate many of the tasks performed by software developers and are widely used to commit code in various social coding platforms. At present, it is not clear what types of activities these bots perform and understanding it may help design better bots, and find application areas which might benefit from bot adoption. Aim: We aim to categorize the Bot Commits by the type of change (files added, deleted, or modified), find the more commonly changed file types, and identify the groups of file types that tend to get updated together. Method: 12,326,137 commits made by 461 popular bots (that made at least 1000 commits) were examined to identify the frequency and the type of files added/ deleted/ modified by the commits, and association rule mining was used to identify the types of files modified together. Result: Majority of the bot commits modify an existing file, a few of them add new files, while deletion of a file is very rare. Commits involving more than one type of operation are even rarer. Files containing data, configuration, and documentation are most frequently updated, while HTML is the most common type in terms of the number of files added, deleted, and modified. Files of the type "Markdown", "Ignore List", "YAML", "JSON" were the types that are updated together with other types of files most frequently. Conclusion: We observe that majority of bot commits involve single file modifications, and bots primarily work with data, configuration, and documentation files. A better understanding if this is a limitation of the bots and, if overcome, would lead to different kinds of bots remains an open question.
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How Do Code Changes Evolve in Different Platforms? A Mining-Based Investigation
Software developed in different platforms has different characteristics and needs. More specifically, code changes are differently performed in the mobile platform compared to non-mobile platforms (e.g., desktop and Web platforms). Prior works have investigated the differences in specific platforms. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across different software platforms. In this paper, we present a study aiming at investigating the frequency of changes and how source code changes, build changes and test changes co-evolve in mobile and non-mobile platforms. We developed linear regression models to explain which factors influence the frequency of changes in different platforms and applied the Apriori algorithm to find types of changes that frequently occur together. Our findings show that non-mobile repositories have a higher number of commits per month compared to mobile and our regression models suggest that being mobile significantly impacts on the number of commits in a negative direction when controlling for confound factors, such as code size. We also found that developers do not usually change source code files together with build files or test files. We argue that our results can provide valuable information for developers on how changes are performed in different platforms so that practices adopted in successful software systems can be followed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813598
- PAR ID:
- 10180344
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 218 to 222
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME.2019.00033
