@proceedings {export:232407,
	title = {The Uniqueness of Changes: Characteristics and Applications},
	year = {2015},
	month = {05/2015},
	abstract = {Changes in software development come in many forms. Some changes are frequent, idiomatic, or repetitive (e.g. adding checks for nulls or logging important values) while others are unique. We hypothesize that unique changes are different from the more common similar (or non-unique) changes in important ways; they may require more expertise or represent code that is more complex or prone to mistakes. As such, these changes are worthy of study. In this paper, we present a definition of unique changes and provide a method for identifying them in software project history. Based on the results of applying our technique on the Linux kernel and two large projects at Microsoft, we present an empirical study of unique changes. We explore how prevalent unique changes are and characterize where they occur along the architecture of the project. We further investigate developers{\textquoteright} contribution towards uniqueness of changes. We also describe potential applications of leveraging the uniqueness of change and implement two such applications, evaluating the risk of changes based on uniqueness and providing change recommendations for non-unique changes.},
	keywords = {linux kernel},
	url = {http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=232407},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/MSR-TR-2014-149.pdf},
	author = {Ray, Baishakhi and Meiyappan Nagappan and Christian Bird and Nachiappan Nagappan and Zimmermann, Thomas}
}
@conference {bird2012www,
	title = {Who? What? Where? Examining Distributed Development in Two Large Open Source Projects},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories},
	year = {2012},
	abstract = {To date, a large body of knowledge has been built up around understanding open source software development. However, there is limited research on examining levels of geographic and organizational distribution within open source software projects, despite many studies examining these same aspects in commercial contexts. We set out to fill this gap in OSS knowledge by manually collecting data for two large, mature, successful projects in an effort to assess how distributed both geographically and organizationally. Both Firefox and Eclipse have been the subject of many studies and are ubiquitous in the areas of software development and internet usage respectively. Further, both receive substantial development contributions from many companies. As such, both are worthy of study in order to understand the development processes that they use, how distributed the projects are, and what, if any, relationship distribution has with quality. To this end, we identified the top contributors that made 95\% of the changes over multiple major releases of Firefox and Eclipse and determined their geographic locations and organizational affiliations. We found that Firefox is very geographically distributed with over a third of its components receiving major contributions from developers on different continents, and that components that are highly distributed have no more defects than those that are not. In contrast, Eclipse is directed and developed largely by one company; with IBM making 96\% of the total commits (49\% coming from one lab in Ottawa, Canada). We further examined the distribution in each project{\textquoteright}s constituent subsystems and report the relationship of pre- and post-release defects with geographic and organizational factors.},
	keywords = {eclipse, Firefox},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/bird2012www.pdf},
	author = {Christian Bird and Nachiappan Nagappan}
}
@conference {bird2009pat,
	title = {{Putting it All Together: Using Socio-Technical Networks to Predict Failures}},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering},
	year = {2009},
	note = {First, we build each type of network separately and use network analysis on both to gather metrics for use in a predictive model. Second, we build a socio-technical network which combines the nodes and edges from both the dependency network and the contribution network and use metrics gathered from this network in a predictive model.
We evaluate our approach by collecting data from Mi- crosoft Windows Vista and ECLIPSE development and using logistic regression analysis.},
	abstract = {Studies have shown that social factors in development organizations have a dramatic effect on software quality. Separately, program dependency information has also been used successfully to predict which software components are more fault prone. Interestingly, the influence of these two phenomena have only been studied separately. Intuition and practical experience suggests, however, that task assignment (i.e. who worked on which components and how much) and dependency structure (which components have dependencies on others) together interact to influence the quality of the resulting software. We study the influence of combined socio-technical software networks on the fault-proneness of individual software components within a system. The network properties of a software component in this combined network are able to predict if an entity is failure prone with greater accuracy than prior methods which use dependency or contribution information in isolation. We evaluate our approach in different settings by using it on Windows Vista and across six releases of the Eclipse development environment including using models built from one release to predict failure prone components in the next release. We compare this to previous work. In every case, our method performs as well or better and is able to more accurately identify those software components that have more post-release failures, with precision and recall rates as high as 85\%.},
	keywords = {eclipse, microsoft, social network, vista, windows},
	attachments = {https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/bird2009pat.pdf},
	author = {Christian Bird and Nachiappan Nagappan and Devanbu, Premkumar and Gall, Harald and Brendan Murphy}
}
