Would any of you be interested in helping out (read that as "doing") a research / data mining project for us?  I'd love
to take all of the regressions this year (or for the last year, or whatever period of time can be reasonably
accomplished) and track them back to which commit introduced each of them (already done for some of them).  From there,
I'd like to see what sort of correlations can be found.  Is there a particular area of code that's responsible for them.
 Is there a particular feature (spread across a lot of files, maybe) that's responsible.  Etc.

Maybe it's all over the map.  Maybe it will highlight one or a few areas to take a harder look at.

Anyone interested?

Thanks,
Brad

On Thursday, 21 February 2013 at 07:03:08 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> Would any of you be interested in helping out (read that as "doing") a research / data mining project for us?  I'd love
> to take all of the regressions this year (or for the last year, or whatever period of time can be reasonably
> accomplished) and track them back to which commit introduced each of them (already done for some of them).  From there,
> I'd like to see what sort of correlations can be found.  Is there a particular area of code that's responsible for them.
>  Is there a particular feature (spread across a lot of files, maybe) that's responsible.  Etc.
>
> Maybe it's all over the map.  Maybe it will highlight one or a few areas to take a harder look at.
>
> Anyone interested?
>
> Thanks,
> Brad

It sounds interesting, but what are you expecting to found? And how much are you sure you can found something? I would expect that often code which fixes some feature breaks the same feature in another aspect of functioning which is quite obvious. Sometimes one code relies implicitly on functioning of other code, so when you change the the latter, the former stops working correctly. You provide example with spreading across several files - how does knowing this helps in reducing regressions?