Helping developers help themselves: automatic decomposition of code review changesets

Abstract

Code Reviews, an important and popular mechanism for quality assurance, are often performed on a change set, a set of modified files that are meant to be committed to a source repository as an atomic action. Understanding a code review is more difficult when the change set consists of multiple, independent, code differences. We introduce CLUSTERCHANGES, an automatic technique for decomposing change sets and evaluate its effectiveness through both a quantitative analysis and a qualitative user study.