Cross-Project Build Co-change Prediction

Abstract—Build systems orchestrate how human-readable source code is translated into executable programs. In a software project, source code changes can induce changes in the build system (aka. build co-changes). It is difficult for developers to identify when build co-changes are necessary due to the complexity of build systems. Prediction of build co-changes works well if there is a sufficient amount of training data to build a model. However, in practice, for new projects, there exists a limited number of changes. Using training data from other projects to predict the build co-changes in a new project can help improve the performance of the build co-change prediction. We refer to this problem as cross-project build co-change prediction. In this paper, we propose CroBuild, a novel cross-project build co-change prediction approach that iteratively learns new classi-fiers. CroBuild constructs an ensemble of classifiers by iterativel