一句话：提出语言无关方法，将邮件列表上补丁的早期修订与仓库最终提交关联，实现可靠预集成追踪。
软件演化研究多聚焦仓库内变更，却忽略变更进入仓库前在邮件列表上的预集成历史。由于邮件列表上的修改通常仅通过补丁片段更新传播，识别语义相似的早期修订并将其关联到仓库最终版本并非易事。本文提出一种语言无关的方法，追踪这些原本不可见的变更演化，将所有早期修订与仓库中的最终提交连接起来。作者在 Linux 内核等知名开源软件项目上评估，并用精心构建的 ground truth 验证了高准确率。该技术可用于量化 OSS 开发过程属性，帮助判断开放开发过程是否有效满足正式流程要求，对可靠或安全关键工业产品中的认证与流程合规具有重要意义。
A considerable corpus of research on software evolution focuses on mining changes in software repositories, but omits their pre-integration history. We present a novel method for tracking this otherwise invisible evolution of software changes on mailing lists by connecting all early revisions of changes to their final version in repositories. Since artefact modifications on mailing lists are communicated by updates to fragments (i.e., patches) only, identifying semantically similar changes is a non-trivial task that our approach solves in a language-independent way. We evaluate our method on high-profile open source software (OSS) projects like the Linux kernel, and validate its high accuracy using an elaborately created ground truth. Our approach can be used to quantify properties of OSS development processes, which is an essential requirement for using OSS in reliable or safety-critical industrial products, where certifiability and conformance to processes are crucial. The high accuracy of our technique allows, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time to quantitatively determine if an open development process effectively aligns with given formal process requirements.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{abs-1902-03147,
title = {The List is the Process: Reliable Pre-Integration Tracking of Commits on Mailing Lists},
author = {Ralf Ramsauer and Daniel Lohmann and Wolfgang Mauerer},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1109/icse.2019.00088}
}