Software developers and managers make decisions based on the understanding they have of their software systems. This understanding is both built up experientially and through investigating various software development artifacts. While artifacts can be investigated individually, being able to summarize characteristics about a set of development artifacts can be useful. In this paper we propose lifecycle models as an effective way to gain an understanding of certain development artifacts. Lifecycle models capture the dynamic nature of how various development artifacts change over time in a graphical form that can be easily understood and communicated. Lifecycle models enables reasoning of the underlying processes and dynamics of the artifacts being analyzed. In this paper we describe how lifecycle models can be generated and demonstrate how they can be applied to the code review process of a development project.

1. Extracting
Artifact Lifecycle Models
from Metadata History
Olga Baysal, Oleksii Kononenko, Reid Holmes, Michael W. Godfrey
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo, Canada
{obaysal, okononen, rtholmes, migod}@uwaterloo.ca
DAPSE-13, May 21, 2013

2. Problem Space
Bugzilla
Mailling
listsSource Control
Code
Systems continually change
Tests
2

3. Solution: Artifact Lifecycle Models
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A model that captures how a
system evolves over time
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4. State 1
State 2 State 3
Outcome OutcomeOutcome
qualitative/quantitative
measurements
Solution: Artifact Lifecycle Models
4

5. Example: Code Review
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6. Example: Code Review
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7. Other Applications
7
Issues – status (NEW, ASSIGNED,
WONTFIX, CLOSED), priority (HIGH,
NORMAL, LOW), component
Source code – LOCs added,
LOCs removed, LOCs
modified
Discussions – CLOSED,
UNANSWERED, REOPENED,
DUPLICATE, PROTECTED

8. Artifact Lifecycle Models
• capture development artifact evolution;
• state-based representation that is easy to
understand and communicate;
• provide means to organize and reason about
the data or processes hidden in the artifacts.
8
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