Upon receiving a new issue report, practitioners start by investigating the defect type, the potential ixing efort needed to resolve the defect and the change impact. Moreover, issue reports contain valuable information, such as, the title, description and severity, and researchers leverage the topics of issue reports as a collective metric portraying similar characteristics of a defect. Nonetheless, none of the existing studies leverage the defect topic, i.e., a semantic cluster of defects of the same nature, such as Performance, GUI and Database, to estimate the change impact that represents the amount of change needed in terms of code churn and the number of iles changed. To this end, in this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 298,548 issue reports belonging to three large-scale open-source systems, i.e., Mozilla, Apache and Eclipse, to estimate the change impact in terms of code churn or the number of iles changed while leveraging the topics of issue reports. First, we adopt the Embedded Topic Model (ETM), a state-of-the-art topic modelling algorithm, to identify the topics. Second, we investigate the feasibility of predicting the change impact using the identiied topics and other information extracted from the issue reports by building eight prediction models that classify issue reports requiring small or large change impact along two dimensions, i.e., the code churn size and the number of iles changed. Our results suggest that XGBoost is the best-performing algorithm for predicting the change impact, with an AUC of 0.84, 0.76, and 0.73 for the code churn and 0.82, 0.71 and 0.73 for the number of iles changed metric for Mozilla, Apache, and Eclipse, respectively. Our results also demonstrate that the topics of issue reports improve the recall of the prediction model by up to 45%.

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3MT, what an incredible platform to showcase my research and engage with a diverse audience! I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of conveying the complex concepts of my research in a concise manner to a non-expert audience while maintaining the essence of my work. This experience was unique! It pushed me to refine my communication skills and find creative ways to make my research accessible to a wider audience.

Watch my presentation in the final competition here.

About Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition: The Three Minute Thesis competition challenges researchers to present their research in a clear, concise, and engaging manner, encapsulating years of work in just three minutes to a non expert audience. It serves as a platform to showcase the importance and impact of academic research while honing participants' communication skills.

CAN-CWiC is the premiere Canadian computing conference for Women in Technology. This year, 650 attendees, i.e., faculty members, Ph.D., MSc and undergraduate students from all across Canada, gathered in Toronto to network, learn, share and mentor women in computing.

Being surrounded by hundreds of young and professional achieved women in the tech field felt so empowering. Once on stage, I embraced the "butterflies" in my stomach and opened my talk by raising the voice advocating for women's rights around the world. I ended my speech with a piece of advice to the students: "Be comfortable with imperfections". Why imperfection? Read more about my journey of breaking free from the voice of perfection here.