Developer Prioritization in Bug Repositories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a developer prioritization model in bug repositories that ranks developers based on social network analysis and enhances tasks like bug triage, severity identification, and reopened bug prediction.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to model developer priorities in bug repositories and demonstrates its effectiveness in improving predictive tasks.

Findings

Developer prioritization improves bug triage accuracy.

Model effectively captures developer influence and evolution.

Application in Eclipse and Mozilla repositories shows practical benefits.

Abstract

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.