Developer Prioritization in Bug Repositories

Abstract—Developers build all the software artifacts in de-velopment. Existing work has studied the social behavior in software repositories. In one of the most important software repositories, a bug repository, developers create and update bug reports to support software development and maintenance. However, no prior work has considered the priorities of devel-opers in bug repositories. In this paper, we address the prob-lem of the developer prioritization, which aims to rank the contributions of developers. We mainly explore two aspects, namely modeling the developer prioritization in a bug reposi-tory and assisting predictive tasks with our model. First, we model how to assign the priorities of developers based on a social network technique. Three problems are investigated, including the developer rankings in products, the evolution over time, and the tolerance of noisy comments. Second, we consider leveraging the developer prioritization to improve three predicted tasks in bug repositories, i.e., bug triage, sever-ity identification, and reopened bug prediction. We empirically investigate the performance of our model and its applications in bug repositories of Eclipse and Mozilla. The results indicate that the developer prioritization can provide the knowledge of developer priorities to assist software tasks, especially the task of bug triage. Keywords-developer prioritization; software evolution; bug triage; severity identification; reopened bug prediction I