The Characteristics and Impact of Uncompilable Code Changes on Software Quality Evolution

摘要

Software repositories allow multiple developers to iteratively contribute commits, with the intention of improving the system. However, commits can negatively impact software quality, or even cause the software to become uncompilable. Recent studies show that uncompilable commits exist even in high-profile open-source software. Identifying broken code, a potential symptom of careless development, and analyzing how software changes when it becomes uncompilable can shed light on how software quality evolves when developers do not follow best practices. Since comprehensive software quality analysis tools are incapable of analyzing uncompilable commits, there is little insight as to what happens and how quality changes when a commit breaks the compilability. In this paper, starting from an analysis of the software quality metric changes that happen when the project become uncompilable, we explore the purposes of commits and the relations between commit type, size and compilability, analyzed across 68 open-source Java repositories.