Mozilla: Closing the Circle Giuliano Antoniol

Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) repositories and bug tracking systems are valuable sources of information to study the evolution of large open source software systems. However, being conceived for specific purposes, i.e., to support the development or trigger maintenance activities, they do neither allow an easy information browsing nor support the study of software evolution. For example, queries such as locating and browsing the faultiest methods are not provided. This paper addresses such issues and proposes an approach and a framework to consistently merge information extracted from source code, CVS repositories and bug reports. Our information representation exploits the property concepts of the FAMIX information exchange meta-model, allowing to represent, browse, and query, at different level of abstractions, the concept of interest. This allows the user to navigate back and forth from CVS modification reports to bug reports and to source code. As a result, concepts can be traced across different data sources to combine different conceptual abstractions for evolution analysis. This paper presents the analysis framework and approaches to populate it, tools developed and under development for it, as well as lessons learned while analyzing several releases of Mozilla