An Entropy-Based Metric of Developer Contribution in Open Source Development and Its Application toF ault-ProneP rogram Analysis

Abstract

To support successful quality managements of open source software (OSS) projects, this paper proposes to measure the balance of developers’ contributions to a source file as an entropy. Through an analysis of data collected from 10 popular OSS projects, the following trends are reported: a source file is more faultprone as the developers’ contributions to the file are more imbalanced (lower entropy), and the proposed metric can be useful for predicting fault-prone programs.