Mining Change Logs and Release Notes to Understand Software Maintenance and Evolution

Software change logs and release notes are documents released together with new versions of a software product. They contain the description of the changes made to the previous version and the new features introduced in the new version. In this paper, we present a keywordbased approach to mining and analyzing non-source code documents and define a mathematical framework to represent the data. This approach is applied in the study of the change logs of Linux and the release notes of FreeBSD. The results show that the software maintenance process and evolution process share some common properties and the keyword-based text mining technique could be used as a systematic method to study software maintenance and evolution.