Investigating Inappropriately Partitioned Commits.

Abstract

Each commit in repositories of version control systems should include code changes for only a single task. However, in real repositories, there are many commits for multiple tasks and tasks split into multiple commits. We call the latter IP commits (inappropriately partitioned commits). In this research, we firstly investigate how many and what kinds of IP commits are included in repositories. Then, we classify the found IP commits into three categories. Based on the classification, we propose a new technique to detect IP commits automatically. This is the first research that proposes a technique to detect IP commits. To evaluate the proposed technique, we applied it to repositories of two open source software. The results showed that the proposed technique detected IP commits with high accuracy (precision is 0.8 and F-measure is 0.7).