Volunteer for research project?

[Maxim Fomin]

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?