Assessing Software Evolution with the Stickiness Score: Evaluating Code Persistence Across Files, Folders, and Developers- Replication Package

This package contains data and source code for the Devotion backend, frontend, and hypothesis testing. It is organized into two main folders:

• Devotion: Contains the source code for both the frontend and backend of Devotion.
• Hypothesis_Testing: Includes the preprocess-input folder, where Devotion’s output files are processed for hypothesis testing. The tokens folder requires a Git token. Other subfolders contain data, source code for hypothesis testing, test results, and plots corresponding to research questions.

Below are the instructions for running the Python scripts.

Before running the backend, install these dependencies using the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To run the backend of Devotion, navigate to the Devotion folder and use the following command:

python ./Devotion/runner.py <GitHub_Repo_URL> <Log_File_Name>

Before starting the web application, ensure all dependencies are installed by running:

npm install

To start the web application of Devotion, navigate to the client folder and run:

cd ./Devotion/frontend/client
npm run start

1. Write your GitHub token:

   • Save your GitHub token in the Hypothesis_Testing/tokens/github-token.txt file to allow the scripts to access the GitHub API.

2. Place the required files:

   • Copy authors.json and folder_structure.json from the Devotion/frontend/client/src folder into the Hypothesis_Testing/preprocess-input folder, inside a new folder named after your project.

3. Execute the hypothesis testing for each research question:

   • First, run the Python script located in the preprocess folder.
   • Then, run the Python script in the hypothesis folder.

4. Output:

   • Results, including data points, plots, and the outcomes of normality and correlation tests, will be saved in the hypothesis-output folder.