Expertise identification and visualization from CVS

ABSTRACT

As software evolves over time, the identification of expertise becomes an important problem. Component ownership and team awareness of such ownership are signals of solid project. Ownership and ownership awareness are also issues in open-source software (OSS) projects. Indeed, the membership in OSS projects is dynamic with team members arriving and leaving. In large open source projects, specialists who know the system very well are considered experts. How can one identify the experts in a project by mining a particular repository like the source code? Have they gotten help from other people?

We provide an approach using classification of the source code tree as a path to derive the expertise of the committers. Because committers may get help from other people, we also retrieve their contributors. We also provide a visualization that helps to further explore the repository via committers and categories. We present a prototype implementation that describes our research using the Apache HTTP Web server project as a case study.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
classification, expertise identification, information visualization, open source