Developer Prioritization in Bug Repositories
This work addresses the need for prioritizing developers in bug repositories to improve software maintenance tasks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing social network methods without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of ranking developer contributions in bug repositories by modeling developer prioritization using a social network technique and applying it to predictive tasks like bug triage, severity identification, and reopened bug prediction, with results showing it assists software tasks, particularly bug triage, in Eclipse and Mozilla repositories.
Developers build all the software artifacts in development. Existing work has studied the social behavior in software repositories. In one of the most important software repositories, a bug repository, developers create and update bug reports to support software development and maintenance. However, no prior work has considered the priorities of developers in bug repositories. In this paper, we address the problem of the developer prioritization, which aims to rank the contributions of developers. We mainly explore two aspects, namely modeling the developer prioritization in a bug repository and assisting predictive tasks with our model. First, we model how to assign the priorities of developers based on a social network technique. Three problems are investigated, including the developer rankings in products, the evolution over time, and the tolerance of noisy comments. Second, we consider leveraging the developer prioritization to improve three predicted tasks in bug repositories, i.e., bug triage, severity identification, and reopened bug prediction. We empirically investigate the performance of our model and its applications in bug repositories of Eclipse and Mozilla. The results indicate that the developer prioritization can provide the knowledge of developer priorities to assist software tasks, especially the task of bug triage.