Heterogeneous Network Analysis of Developer Contribution in Bug Repositories

Abstract

Using a bug repository, developers contribute to improve the quality of software incrementally by creating and updating bug reports. All the software artifacts in bug repositories are derived from developer contribution. Most prior studies on developer contribution in bug repositories bias on one particular form, e.g., commenting bug reports. However, in real practice of bug repositories, developers participate in and contribute to software projects via multiple ways, e.g., reporting new bugs, reopening incorrectly fixed bugs, commenting unfixed bug reports, and fixing unsolved bugs. In this paper, we exploit recent advances in analysis of heterogeneous network to avoid biased aspects in measuring developer contribution and explore multiple types of developer contribution in bug repositories. Further, we consider leveraging such multiple types of developer contribution to assist a typical prediction problem in bug repositories, i.e., bug triage. Empirical studies on bug repositories of Eclipse and Mozilla show that our approach can provide enriched knowledge of developer contribution to improve the resolution of bug triage. This study strongly suggests using the promising aspects of heterogeneous network can open many actionable insights in analyzing software repositories.