Boa: a link between worlds
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Software Engineering
- Keywords
- Traceability, Exploratory, Empirical, URI
- Copyright
- © 2016 Romansky et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Boa: a link between worlds. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1947v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1947v1
Abstract
The business models of software/platform as a service have contributed to developers dependence on the Internet. Developers can rapidly point each other and consumers to the newest software changes with the power of the hyper link. But, developers are not limited to referencing software changes to one another through the web. Other shared hypermedia might include links to: Stack Overflow, Twitter, and issue trackers. This work explores the software traceability of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) which software developers leave in commit messages and software repositories. URLs are easily extracted from commit messages and source code. Therefore, it would be useful to researchers if URLs provide additional insight on project development. To assess traceability, manual topic labelling is evaluated against automated topic labelling on URL data sets. This work also shows differences between URL data collected from commit messages versus URL data collected from source code. As well, this work explores outlying software projects with many URLs in case these projects do not provide meaningful software relationship information. Results from manual topic labelling show promise under evaluation while automated topic labelling did not yield precise topics. Further investigation of manual and automated topic analysis would be useful.
Author Comment
This is a work that was submitted to the 2016 MSR challenge track.