An Automated Tool for Generating Change Report from Open-Source Software

Classes in object-oriented software systems are continuously subject to change. Change prediction is a very important activity in software development. Change data consists of the number of lines of codes added, deleted and modified for each common class between any two versions of a software system. It is important to develop tools to calculate change data and object-oriented metrics that will assist software practitioners in identifying change prone classes in early stages of the software development life cycle. In this paper, we develop a tool, Change Report Generator (CRG) to generate the change report from software source codes of various versions of open-source software. We also extend this tool to automate object-oriented metrics calculation from the source codes of software systems. The generated files store the total number of changes class wise and corresponding values of different object-oriented metrics for each common class between the two versions. This paper gives an overview of some of the applications of the collected data like statistical comparison of two versions and prediction of change-prone classes.