• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.65-72
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• 2014

Change coupling is a measure to show how strongly change-related two entities are. When two source files have been frequently changed together, they are regarded as change-coupled files and they will probably be changed together in the near future. In the previous studies, the change coupling between two files is defined with the number of common changed time, that is, common commit time of the files. However, the frequency-based technique has limitations because of 'tangled changes', which frequently happens in the development environments with version control systems. The tangled change means that several code hunks have been changed at the same time, though they have no relation with each other. In this paper, the change types of the code hunks are also used to define change coupling, in addition to the common commit time of target files. First, the frequency vector based on change types are defined with the extracted change types, and then, the similarity of change patterns are calculated using the cosine similarity measure. We conducted experiments on open source project Eclipse JDT and CDT for case studies. The result shows that the applicability of the proposed method, compared to the previous studies.