Extracting Dependencies from Software Changes: An Industry Experience Report

Retrieving and analyzing information from software repositories and detecting dependencies are important tasks supporting software evolution. Dependency information is used for change impact analysis, defect prediction as well as cohesion and coupling measurement. In this paper we report our experience from extracting dependency information from the change history of a commercial software system. We analyzed the software system's evolution of about six years, from the start of development to the transition to product releases and maintenance. Analyzing the co-evolution of software artifacts allows detecting logical dependencies between system parts implemented with heterogeneous technologies as well as between different types of development artifacts such as source code, data models or documentation. However, the quality of the extracted dependencies relies on established development practices and conformance to a defined change process. In this paper we indicate resulting limitations and recommend further processing and filtering steps to prepare the dependency data for subsequent analysis and measurement activities.