Fine Grained Indexing of Software Repositories to Support Impact Analysis

Versioned and bug-tracked software systems provide a huge amount of historical data regarding source code changes and issues management. In this paper we deal with im-pact analysis of a change request and show that data stored in software repositories are a good descriptor on how past change requests have been resolved. A fine grained analysis method of software repositories is used to index code at dif-ferent levels of granularity, such as lines of code and source files, with free text contained in software repositories. The method exploits information retrieval algorithms to link the change request description and code entities impacted by similar past change requests. We evaluate such approach on a set of three open-source projects