How Software Repositories can Help in Resolving a New Change Request

In open source development, software evolution tasks are usually managed with a bug tracker system, such as Bugzilla [1], and a versioning system, such as CVS [2]. This provides for a huge amount of historical data regarding bug resolutions and new enhancement feature implementations. We discuss how software repositories can help developers in managing a new change request, either a bug or an enhancement feature. The hypothesis is that data stored in software repositories are a good descriptor on how past change requests have been resolved. Textual descriptions of fixed change requests stored in software repositories, both Bugzilla and CVS, are used to index developers and source files as documents in an information retrieval system. For a new change request, such indexes can be useful to identify the most appropriate developers to resolve it, or to predict the set of impacted source files.