Assigning Change Requests to Software Developers - Online Appendix

This web page is a companion to our Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice submission entitled "Assigning Change Requests to Software Developers."

Abstract

The paper presents an approach to recommend a ranked list of expert developers to assist in the implementation of software change requests (e.g., bug reports and feature requests). An Information Retrieval (IR) based concept location technique is first used to locate source code entities, e.g., files and classes, relevant to a given textual description of a change request. The previous commits from version control repositories of these entities are then mined for expert developers. The role of the IR method in selectively reducing the mining space is different from previous approaches that textually index past change requests and/or commits. The approach is evaluated on change requests from three open source systems: ArgoUML, Eclipse, and KOffice, across a range of accuracy criteria. The results show that the overall accuracies of the correctly recommended developers are between 47% and 96% for bug reports, and between 43% and 60% for feature requests. Moreover, comparison results with two other recommendation alternatives show that the presented approach outperforms them with a substantial margin. Project leads or developers can use this approach in maintenance tasks immediately after the receipt of a change request in a free-form text.

Data

	ArgoUML	Eclipse 2.0	Eclipse 3.0	Eclipse 3.3.2	KOffice 2.0-Beta 2
Corpora	argouml-0.26.2-corpus.zip	eclipse-2.0-corpus.zip	eclipse-3.0-corpus.zip	eclipse-3.3.2-corpus.zip	koffice-2.0-beta2-corpus.zip
Corpus Class Mappings	argouml-0.26.2-mapping.txt	eclipse-2.0-mapping.txt	eclipse-3.0-mapping.txt	eclipse-3.3.2-mapping.txt	koffice-2.0-beta2-mapping.txt
Bugs/Queries	argouml-0.26.2-bugs15-queries.csv / argouml-0.26.2-bugs23-queries.csv	eclipse-2.0-bugs-queries.csv	eclipse-3.0-bugs-queries.csv	eclipse-3.3.2-bugs-queries.csv	koffice-2.0-beta2-bugs-queries.csv / koffice-2.0-beta2-features-queries.csv

Download CVS history of ArgoUML, Eclipse pt.1/pt.2, and KOffice.
Download all the ArgoUML 0.26.2 data (1.2M), Eclipse 2.0 data (8.2M), Eclipse 3.0 data (11M), Eclipse 3.3.2 data (19M), and KOffice 2.0 beta2 data (3.3M).

Results

Short summary of accuracy results for all software systems.
Complete accuracy results for all software systems.

Prior Publications

Kagdi, H., Poshyvanyk, D., "Who Can Help Me with this Change Request?", in the Proceedings of 17th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC2009), Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 17-19, 2009, pp. 273-277 [pdf]