Author Entropy: A Metric for Characterization of Software Authorship Patterns

Submitted by msquire on Sat, 2011-04-30 16:19

Title	Author Entropy: A Metric for Characterization of Software Authorship Patterns
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2008
Authors	Taylor, QC, Stevenson, JE, Delorey, DP, Knutson, CD
Secondary Title	3rd Workshop on Public Data about Software Development (WoPDaSD 2008)
Pagination	42-47
Date Published	2008
Keywords	developers, entropy, flossmole, sourceforge
Abstract	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.
Notes	used flossmole to get sample of SF developers
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