An Entropy-Based Metric of Developer Contribution in Open Source Development and Its Application to Fault-Prone Program Analysis*
Yamauchi Kazuki, Hirohisa Aman, Sousuke Amasaki, Tomoyuki Yokogawa, Minoru Kawahara · The International journal of networked and distributed computing · 2018
To support successful quality managements of open source software (OSS) projects, this paper proposes to measure the balance of developers’ contributions to a source file as an entropy. Through an analysis of data collected from 10 popular OSS projects, the following trends are reported: a source file is more fault-prone as the developers’ contributions to the file are more imbalanced (lower entropy), and the proposed metric can be useful for predicting fault-prone programs.