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Effectiveness of exploring historical commits for developer recommendation: an empirical study |
Xiaobing SUN1,2,5( ), Hui YANG1, Hareton LEUNG3, Bin LI1, Hanchao (Jerry) LI4, Lingzhi LIAO6 |
1. School of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225127, China 2. Information Technology Research Base of Civil Aviation Administration of China, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin 300300, China 3. Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China 4. Coventry University, Coventry CVI 5FB, UK 5. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China 6. Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China |
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Abstract Developer recommendation is an essential task for resolving incoming issues in the evolution of software. Many developer recommendation techniques have been developed in the literature; among these studies, most techniques usually combined historical commits as supplementary information with bug repositories and/or source-code repositories to recommend developers. However, the question of whether themessages in historical commits are always useful has not yet been answered. This article aims at solving this problem by conducting an empirical study on four open-source projects. The results show that: (1) the number of meaningfulwords of the commit description has an impact on the quality of the commit, and a larger number of meaningful words in the description means that it can generally better reflect developers’ expertise; (2) using commit description to recommend the relevant developers is better than that using relevant files that are recorded in historical commits; (3) developers tend to change the relevant files that they have changed many times before; (4) developers generally tend to change the files that they have changed recently.
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Keywords
developer recommendation
historical commits
empirical study
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Corresponding Author(s):
Xiaobing SUN
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Just Accepted Date: 30 September 2016
Online First Date: 06 March 2018
Issue Date: 02 May 2018
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