Characterizing Individualized Coding Contributions of OSS Developers from Topic Perspective

Developers participating in an open source software (OSS) project make contributions to the project at different levels and aspects. Their underlying technical interests, expertise, and working habits are indirectly delineated by their personal contributions. This paper is to discover the individualized contribution features of developers by latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach. Dominant latent topics of each developer and the corresponding topic coverage degree are extracted from the source codes committed to the project repository, and such topic model is validated to be feasible for representing the individualized contribution features by statistics tests. Four types of topic evolution patterns are observed from the commit history of a developer. Temporal locality is partially exhibited in the topic evolution but there usually exhibit drastic changes between time-adjacent contributions of a developer. Respective proportions of the four evolution patterns and the degree of temporal locality in the...