DevNet: Exploring Developer Collaboration in Heterogeneous Networks of Bug Repositories

During open source software development and maintenance, bug fixing is a result of developer collaboration. Understanding the structure of developer collaboration could be helpful for effective and efficient bug fixing. Most prior work on exploring developer collaboration in bug repositories only considers a particular form of developer collaboration. However, in real software bug repositories, developers collaborate with each other via multiple ways, e.g., commenting bugs, tossing bugs, and assigning bugs. In this paper, we present DevNet, a framework for representing and analyzing developer collaboration in bug repositories based on heterogeneous developer networks. Moreover, we illustrate that such developer collaboration can assist bug triage through a case study on the bug repositories of Eclipse and Mozilla involving over 800,000 bug reports. Experiment results show that our approach can improve the state-of-the-art bug triage methods by 5-15% in accuracy. We believe that the proposed approach provides new insights for analyzing software repositories through heterogeneous networks.