Investigating the information value of different sources of evidence of developers’ expertise for bug assignment in open‐source projects

Abstract

Bug assignment (BA), the process of ranking developers according to their potential ability to fix a given bug, is an important software‐engineering task. BA usually requires the development of an expertise profile for each developer, and formulation of a similarity metric to estimate the relevance of developers to the bug. This needs us to answer the following question: ‘what is the information value of various contributions of developers in BA research?’ We address this question by making the following contributions. (i) We enhance the expertise metric of our prior work, vocabulary and time‐based BA, to consider information regarding various sources of expertise with different importance. We show that this can improve the effectiveness of bug‐assignment process. (ii) Using this ‘Multisource’ expertise metric, we investigate the information value of different pieces of information in open‐source repositories for BA. We show that in addition to bug‐fixing contributions, other technical and even social contributions of developers within the version‐control system are useful information for BA. (iii) We provide a curated, up‐to‐date data set including technical information of 13 popular open‐source projects in Github. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive data set, currently available for bug‐assignment research.