How Do Code Changes Evolve in Different Platforms? A Mining-based Investigation

TL;DR

This study compares how code changes evolve in mobile versus non-mobile platforms, revealing differences in change frequency and co-evolution patterns, with implications for best development practices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of change patterns across platforms using regression and association rule mining, filling a gap in cross-platform change evolution understanding.

Findings

Non-mobile repositories have more commits per month.

Mobile development negatively impacts commit frequency when controlling for other factors.

Developers rarely change source code files together with build or test files.

Abstract

Code changes are performed differently in the mobile and non-mobile platforms. Prior work has investigated the differences in specific platforms. However, we still lack a deeper understanding of how code changes evolve across different software platforms. In this paper, we present a study aiming at investigating the frequency of changes and how source code, build and test changes co-evolve in mobile and non-mobile platforms. We developed regression models to explain which factors influence the frequency of changes and applied the Apriori algorithm to find types of changes that frequently co-occur. Our findings show that non-mobile repositories have a higher number of commits per month and our regression models suggest that being mobile significantly impacts on the number of commits in a negative direction when controlling for confound factors, such as code size. We also found that developers do not usually change source code files together with build or test files. We argue that our results can provide valuable information for developers on how changes are performed in different platforms so that practices adopted in successful software systems can be followed.