Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
CS 590/690 SEMINAR
Leveraging File Significance in Bus Factor Estimation
Vahid Haratian
Master Student
(Supervisor: Asst.Prof.Eray Tüzün)
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Abstract: Software projects experience the departure of developers due to various reasons. Developers are one of the important sources of knowledge in software projects. Therefore, this dismissal will result in knowledge loss. Bus Factor is a metric to evaluate how this knowledge loss can affect the project's continuity. The bus factor is calculated as the smallest set of developers, taking away more than half of the project knowledge in case of departure. Recent studies in the field measure developers' knowledge in terms of the number of files they have contributed to according to the source control history. However, some studies showed that files in software projects have different significance. Therefore, considering this difference in bus factor calculation might improve the estimation. In our study, we would like to evaluate the effect of integrating graph topological metrics extracted from the software dependency graphs as significance indicators to two existing BF estimation algorithms. We aim to evaluate the possible performance gain of the approach compared to the baseline methods. We believe to calculate the bus factor from authorship over software components, the components should not be treated as equals. Our approach only includes topological traits of the components. However, adding features like maintainability, code complexity, etc., may improve the estimation.
DATE: May 8, Monday @ 16:50 Place: Zoom