
148 Empirical Research in Software Engineering
5.3.1 Historical Repositories
Historical repositories record varied information regarding the evolution and progress of a
software project. They also capture signicant historical dependencies prevalent between
various artifacts of a project, such as functions (in the source code), documentation les,
or conguration les (Gall etal. 1998). Developers can possibly employ the information
extracted from these historical repositories for various purposes. A major area of applica-
tion is propagating the changes to related artifacts, instead of analyzing only static and/or
dynamic code dependencies that ...