Author Entropy: A Metric for Characterization of Software Authorship Patterns
Quinn Taylor, James E. Stevenson, Daniel P. Delorey, Charles D. Knutson · 2008
We propose the concept of author entropy and describe how file-level entropy measures may be used to understand and characterize authorship patterns within individual files, as well as across an entire project. As a proof of concept, we compute author entropy for 28,955 files from 33 open-source projects. We explore patterns of author entropy, identify techniques for visualizing author entropy, and propose av-enues for further study. 1.