Retrieving Task-Related Clusters From Change History

During software maintenance tasks, developers often spend an important amount of effort investigating source code. This effort can be reduced if tools are available to help developers navigate the source code effectively. For this purpose, the authors propose to search the change history of a software system to identify clusters of program elements related to a task. They evaluated the feasibility of this idea with an extensive historical analysis of change data. Their study evaluated to what extent change sets approximating tasks could have benefited from knowledge about clusters of past changes.