%0 Conference Paper %B 3rd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2008) %D 2008 %T Author Entropy: A Metric for Characterization of Software Authorship Patterns %A Taylor, Quinn C. %A Stevenson, James E. %A Delorey, Daniel P. %A Knutson, Charles D. %K developers %K entropy %K flossmole %K sourceforge %X 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 avenues for further study. %B 3rd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2008) %P 42-47 %8 2008 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/entropy2008.pdf