How interesting are suggestions of coupled file changes for software developers?

Software repositories represent a data source from which we can extract interesting information to be presented to the developers working on their maintenance tasks. Various studies use the software repositories to extract sets of files that changed frequently in the past. However, they do not consider feedback from developers on whether they would like to use this kind of information. The aim of our research is to support developers in maintenance tasks using suggestions which other files they should also change. We investigate three software repositories to find coupled file changes to support the software developers. We also propose a set of attributes from the versioning system, the issue tracking system and the project documentation. We contrast our findings with the feedback gathered using survey and interviews with the developers. According to our results, small repositories make an insightful analysis difficult. Both from experienced and inexperienced developers, the feedback was mostly neutral. Most of the attributes we proposed were accepted as interesting by the developers. Furthermore, developers also suggested other additional issues to be relevant, e.g. the context of the coupled changes. Generally, developers did not reject the coupled file changes suggestions. However, the presentation form of coupled changes and context information need to be taken into account.