  Although literature has noted the effects of branch handling strategies on
change recommendation based on evolutionary coupling, they have been tested in
a limited experimental setting. Additionally, the branches characteristics that
lead to these effects have not been investigated. In this study, we revisited
the investigation conducted by Kovalenko et al. on the effect to change
recommendation using two different branch handling strategies: including
changesets from commits on a branch and excluding them. In addition to the
setting by Kovalenko et al., we introduced another setting to compare:
extracting a changeset for a branch from a merge commit at once. We compared
the change recommendation results and the similarity of the extracted
co-changes to those in the future obtained using two strategies through 30
open-source software systems. The results show that handling commits on a
branch separately is often more appropriate in change recommendation, although
the comparison in an additional setting resulted in a balanced performance
among the branch handling strategies. Additionally, we found that the merge
commit size and the branch length positively influence the change
recommendation results.
