Characterizing Individualized Coding Contributions of OSS Developers from Topic Perspective

Abstract

Developers participating in an open source software (OSS) project make contributions to the project at different levels and aspects. Their underlying technical interests, expertise, and working habits are indirectly delineated by their personal contributions. This paper is to discover the individualized contribution features of developers by latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach. Dominant latent topics of each developer and the corresponding topic coverage degree are extracted from the source codes committed to the project repository, and such topic model is validated to be feasible for representing the individualized contribution features by statistics tests. Four types of topic evolution patterns are observed from the commit history of a developer. Temporal locality is partially exhibited in the topic evolution but there usually exhibit drastic changes between time-adjacent contributions of a developer. Respective proportions of the four evolution patterns and the degree of temporal locality in the topic evolution delineate a developer’s individualized working habits in the time dimension. It is also proved that the correlation among the topic models of different developers is not equivalent to the real social collaborations among them. The outcome of this study would help OSS project coordinators get deep understanding on the work preferences and behavioral patterns of team members, thus facilitate project coordination activities such as task allocations.