Code Authorship and Fault-proneness of Open-Source Android Applications: An Empirical Study
Code Authorship and Fault-proneness of Open-Source Android Applications: An Empirical Study
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开源 Android 应用程序的代码作者和故障倾向：一项实证研究
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Evarist Nabaasa
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文献类型：
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作者：
John Businge;Simon Kawuma;Engineer Bainomugisha;Foutse Khomh;Evarist Nabaasa
背景：近年来，许多研究表明，人的因素如何在软件组件的质量中发挥重要作用。在大型分布式软件开发团队中分配任务时，引入代码作者度量来建立责任链并简化管理。研究人员已经调查了代码作者度量和软件系统中的故障发生之间的关系。然而，我们已经观察到，这些研究仅在具有数百到数千个贡献者的大型软件系统上进行。在我们对被认为相对较小的Android应用程序的初步调查中，我们观察到应用程序系统并不完全由单个开发人员拥有（正如人们所期望的那样），并且也存在像大型系统一样没有明确作者的情况。为此，我们相信Android应用程序可能面临与大型软件系统相同的挑战，并且也可以从这些研究中受益。目标：我们调查在大型软件系统上获得的结果在多大程度上适用于Android应用程序。方法：基于以前研究的设计，我们分析了从GitHub上精心挑选的278个Android应用程序。我们从应用程序中提取代码作者度量，并使用统计建模来检查代码作者度量与故障之间的关系。结果：我们的分析证实了大多数以前的发现，即，贡献者中代码作者级别较高的Android应用程序遇到的错误较少。
Context: In recent years, many research studies have shown how human factors play a significant role in the quality of software components. Code authorship metrics have been introduced to establish a chain of responsibility and simplify management when assigning tasks in large and distributed software development teams. Researchers have investigated the relationship between code authorship metrics and fault occurrences in software systems. However, we have observed that these studies have only been carried on large software systems having hundreds to thousands of contributors. In our preliminary investigations on Android applications that are considered to be relatively small, we observed that applications systems are not totally owned by a single developer (as one could expect) and that cases of no clear authorship also exist like in large systems. To this end, we do believe that the Android applications could face the same challenges faced by large software systems and could also benefit from such studies. Goal: We investigate the extent to which the findings obtained on large software systems applies to Android applications. Approach: Building on the designs of previous studies, we analyze 278 Android applications carefully selected from GitHub. We extract code authorship metrics from the applications and examine the relationship between code authorship metrics and faults using statistical modeling. Results: Our analyses confirm most of the previous findings, i.e., Android applications with higher levels of code authorship among contributors experience fewer faults.