Modeling Bug Reporter Reputation

Tracking and resolving of software bugs are very important tasks for software developers and maintainers. Bug-tracking systems are tools which are widely used in open source projects to support these activities. The empirical Software Engineering research community pays considerable attention to bug-tracking-related topics in order to provide bug-tracking systems users with adequate software and tool support. Bug-tracking is a highly socialized process which requires constant communication between developers and bug reporters. However, the inherent social structure of bug tracking systems and its influence on everyday bug-tracking has earlier been poorly studied. In this work I address the role of bug reporter reputation. Using publicly available information from bug-tracking system database, I model bug reporter reputation to check whether there is any evidence of relation between reporter reputation and attention from developers his bugs get. If reputation actually plays important role in bug-tracking activities and can relatively easily be extracted, existing prediction techniques could potentially be improved by using reputation as additional input variable; bug-tracking software could be supported with more formal notion of reporter reputation