On the differences between quality increasing and other changes in open source Java projects

Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality models to evaluate software quality. Static analysis tools also include boundary values for complexity and size that generate warnings for developers. However, recent studies found that complexity metrics may be unreliable indicators for understandability of the source code and therefore may have less impact on software quality. To explore the relationship between quality and changes, we leverage the intent of developers about what constitutes a quality improvement in their own code base. We manually classify a randomized sample of 2,533 commits from 54 Java open source projects as quality improving depending on the intent of the developer by inspecting the commit message. We distinguish between perfective and corrective maintenance via predefined guidelines and use this data as ground truth for fine-tuning a state-of-the art deep learning model created for natural language processing. The benchmark we provide with our ground truth indicates that the deep learning model can be confidently used for commit intent classification. We use the model to increase our data set to 125,482 commits. Based on the resulting data set, we investigate the differences in size and 14 static source code metrics between changes that increase quality and other changes. In addition, we investigate which files are targets of quality improvements. We find that quality improving commits are smaller than other commits. Perfective changes have a positive impact on static source code metrics while corrective changes do tend to add complexity. Furthermore, we find that files which are the target of perfective maintenance already have a lower median complexity than other files.