[jira] [Created] (CASSANDRA-8954) risk analysis of patches based on past defects

["Russ Hatch (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Russ Hatch created CASSANDRA-8954:
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             Summary: risk analysis of patches based on past defects
                 Key: CASSANDRA-8954
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8954
             Project: Cassandra
          Issue Type: Test
            Reporter: Russ Hatch
            Assignee: Russ Hatch


Some changes to source are much more risky than others, and we can analyze data from JIRA + git to make educated guesses about risk level. This is a backwards looking technique with limitations but still may be useful (yes, the past does not equal the future!).

(disclaimer: I did not come up with this technique).

The basic idea is to build a tool which correlates past Defect tickets to the files which were changed to fix them. If a Defect required changes to specific files to fix, then in some sense past changes to those files (or their original implementations) were problematic. Therefore, future changes to those files carry some potential risk as well.

This requires getting an occasional dump of Defect type issues, and an occasional dump of commit messages. Defects would have to be associated to commits based on a text search of commit messages. From there we build a weighted model of which source files get touched the most to fix defects (say giving each file name a ranking of 1 to 10 where 10 carries the most risk).

To analyze specific patches going forward we look at the defect weight for that source file, and factor in a metric for a patch's changes in that file (maybe lines changed, or change in cyclomatic complexity). Out of this we get a number representing a theoretical risk.



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