Change Prediction through Coding Rules Violations

Abstract

Static source code analysis is an increasingly important activity to manage software project quality, and is often found as a part of the development process. A widely adopted way of checking code quality is through the detection of violations to specific sets of rules addressing good programming practices. SonarQube is a platform able to detect these violations, called Issues. In this paper we described an empirical study performend on two industrial projects, where we used Issues extracted on different versions of the projects to predict changes in code through a set of machine learning models. We achieved good detection performances, especially when predicting changes in the next version. This result paves the way for future investigations of the interest in an industrial setting towards the prioritization of Issues management according to their impact on change-proneness.