Determining Implementation Expertise from Bug Reports

Abstract

As developers work on a software product they accumulate expertise, including expertise about the code base of the software product. We call this type of expertise 'implementation expertise'. Knowing the set of developers who have implementation expertise for a software product has many important uses. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of two approaches to determining implementation expertise from the data in source and bug repositories. The expertise sets created by the approaches are compared to those provided by experts and evaluated using the measures of precision and recall. We found that both approaches are good at finding all of the appropriate developers, although they vary in how many false positives are returned.