Supporting change request assignment in open source development

Abstract

Software repositories, such as CVS and Bugzilla, provide a huge amount of data regarding, respectively, source code and change request history. In this paper we propose a study on how change requests have been assigned to developers involved in an open source project and a method to suggest the set of best candidate developers to resolve a new change request. The method is based on the hypothesis that, given a new change request, developers that have resolved similar change requests in the past are the best candidates to resolve the new one. The suggestion can be useful for project managers in order to choose the best candidate to resolve a particular change request and/or to construct a competence database of developers working on software projects. We use the textual description of change requests stored in software repositories to index developers as documents in an information retrieval system. An Information Retrieval method is then applied to retrieve the candidate developers using the textual description of a new change request as a query.Case and evaluation study of the analysis and the methods introduced in this paper has been conducted on two large open source projects, Mozilla and KDE.