An exploratory study of the impact of software changeability

Antipatterns are poor design choices that make object-oriented systems hard to maintain by developers. In this study, we investigate if classes that participate in antipatterns are more change-prone than classes that do not. Specifically, we test the general hypothesis: classes belonging to antipatterns are not more likely than other classes to undergo changes, to be impacted when fixing issues posted in issue- tracking systems, and in particular to unhandled exceptions-related issues - a crucial problem for any software system. We detect 11 antipatterns in 13 releases of Eclipse and study the relations between classes involved in these antipatterns and classes change-, issue-, and unhandled exception-proneness. We show that, in almost all releases of Eclipse, classes with antipatterns are more change-, issue-, and unhandled-exception-prone than others. These results justify previous work on the specification and detection of antipatterns and could help focusing quality assurance and testing activities.

Mots clés

Antipatterns, Mining Software Repositories, Empirical Software Engineering