An Empirical Study of Developer Quality

Human factors have attracted more and more attention in software engineering. Of many kinds of developer metrics proposed, developer quality is important. Recently, some researchers measure a developer's quality as the rate of his/hernon bug-introducing commits. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of this developer quality metric. We use the data of six open source software projects and get the following conclusions: (1) the values of developer quality in a project are uniformly distributed in a certain range, (2) developer quality tends to increase with software evolution, (3) developers with more contribution are more likely to have higher developer quality, (4) ownership does not have a consistent and significant correlation with developer quality. These results can provide project leaders and team members with some guides to improve developer quality, and thus improve software quality.