Source Code Author Attribution Using Author’s Programming Style and Code Smells

Abstract

Abstract-Source code is an intellectual property and using it without author's permission is a violation of property right. Source code authorship attribution is vital for dealing with software theft, copyright issues and piracies. Characterizing author's signature for identifying their footprints is the core task of authorship attribution. Different aspects of source code have been considered for characterizing signatures including author's coding style and programming structure, etc. The objective of this research is to explore another trait of authors' coding behavior for personifying their footprints. The main question that we want to address is that "can code smells are useful for characterizing authors' signatures? A machine learning based methodology is described not only to address the question but also for designing a system. Two different aspects of source code are considered for its representation into features: author's style and code smells. The author's style related feature representation is used as baseline. Results have shown that code smell can improves the authorship attribution.

Discovering software developer's coding expertise through deep learning

“…Code smells refer to patterns of poor design and faults, which make the source code worse. Though the flaws in code do not affect the output, but these made it hard to modify the program and further enhancement in it [21, 23]. The poorly written code is likely to have many bugs.…”

“…Two most significant aspects of source code, including the author's code style and code smells, can characterise the author's signature. The code style describes the consistencies in the author's writing style that is represented by various features of programming layout, programming structure and programming style [21].…”

“…The coding style based on the recommended programming conventions helps to increase code comprehension. The comprehensible code leads towards software maintainability, reliability as well as reduce the vulnerability and complexity [21, 22]. The maintainability, reliability and quality of a program depend on technical expertise and maturity of software developers [23].…”