Title: Mining expertise of developers from software repositories

Authors: Maen Hammad; Haneen Hijazi; Mustafa Hammad; Ahmed Fawzi Otoom

Addresses: Department of Software Engineering, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan ' Department of Computer Information Systems, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan ' Department of Computer Science, Mutah University, Mutah, Al Karak, Jordan ' Department of Software Engineering, The Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan

Abstract: This paper presents a technique to mine the developers' contributions to explore their expertise in open source projects. The technique analyses the keywords that appear in the textual content of commits. It is a lightweight technique since the text in commits is analysed without making any syntactic code differencing. Each developer is linked with a list of keywords, with their frequencies, that appeared in his commits. Based on these keywords, three types of expertise are defined: unique, common and frequent. The identified expertise can help in identifying topics or issues that are handled by specific or group of developers. A tool is developed to automatically mine and analyse committed code changes to support expertise identification. A case study is presented on three open source projects to show how the proposed techniques can be applied. The observations of the study showed that frequent terms provide useful information about developers' expertise.

Keywords: software maintenance and evolution; mining software repositories; expertise mining.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2020.106581

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2020 Vol.62 No.3, pp.227 - 239

Received: 04 Jul 2019
Accepted: 12 Aug 2019
Published online: 15 Apr 2020 *

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