An Analysis of Author Contribution Patterns in Eclipse Foundation Project Source Code

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-12-01 10:53

Title	An Analysis of Author Contribution Patterns in Eclipse Foundation Project Source Code
Publication Type	Conference Proceedings
Year of Publication	2011
Authors	Taylor, QC, Krein, JL, MacLean, AC, Knutson, CD
Secondary Title	Open Source Systems: Grounding Research (OSS 2011)
Pagination	269-281
Date Published	10/2011
Publisher	Springer
Keywords	COLLABORATION, contribution, eclipse, entropy, java
Abstract	Collaborative development is a key tenet of open source software, but if not properly understood and managed, it can become a liability. We examine author contribution data for the newest revision of 251,633 Java source files in 592 Eclipse projects. We use this observational data to analyze collaboration patterns within files, and to explore relationships between file size, author count, and code authorship. We calculate author entropy to characterize the contributions of multiple authors to a given file, with an eye toward understanding the degree of collaboration and the most common interaction patterns.
Notes	"We conducted an observational study on existing Eclipse projects by extracting author attribution data for Java source code files from git repositories." "Specifically, we consider entropy of source code by counting the number of lines attributed to each author."
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