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Mining authorship characteristics in bug repositories

缺陷仓库中写作风格挖掘

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Abstract

Bug reports are widely employed to facilitate software tasks in software maintenance. Since bug reports are contributed by people, the authorship characteristics of contributors may heavily impact the perfor-mance of resolving software tasks. Poorly written bug reports may delay developers when fixing bugs. However, no in-depth investigation has been conducted over the authorship characteristics. In this study, we first leverage byte-level N-grams to model the authorship characteristics and employ Normalized Simplified Profile Intersection (NSPI) to identify the similarity of the authorship characteristics. Then, we investigate a series of properties related to contributors’ authorship characteristics, including the evolvement over time and the variation among distinct products in open source projects. Moreover, we show how to leverage the authorship characteristics to facilitate a well-known task in software maintenance, namely Bug Report Summarization (BRS). Experiments on open source projects validate that incorporating the authorship characteristics can effectively improve a state-of-the-art method in BRS. Our findings suggest that contributors should retain stable authorship characteristics and the authorship characteristics can assist in resolving software tasks.

创新点

本文创造性的利用比特级N元文法来为缺陷仓库中的贡献者的写作风格建模, 同时引入NSPI来度量两种写作风格之间的相似度。本文研究了贡献者写作风格的一些性质, 包括贡献者写作风格随时间的变化情况以及在不同产品的变化情况等。进而利用贡献者写作风格来帮助解决一个典型的软件维护任务, 即缺陷报告摘要。本文的实验数据已经公开。实验结果表明, 利用开发者写作风格能够有效的提升缺陷报告摘要的效果

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116621, China

    He Jiang, Jingxuan Zhang, Hongjing Ma, Najam Nazar & Zhilei Ren

  2. Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province, Dalian, 116621, China

    He Jiang, Jingxuan Zhang, Hongjing Ma, Najam Nazar & Zhilei Ren

  3. State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    He Jiang

Authors
  1. He Jiang
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  2. Jingxuan Zhang
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  3. Hongjing Ma
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  4. Najam Nazar
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  5. Zhilei Ren
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Correspondence to He Jiang.

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Jiang, H., Zhang, J., Ma, H. et al. Mining authorship characteristics in bug repositories. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 60, 012107 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-0372-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-014-0372-y

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