Mining authorship characteristics in bug repositories

Bug reports are widely employed to facilitate software tasks in software maintenance. Since bug reports are contributed by people, the authorship characteristics of contributors may heavily impact the performance of resolving software tasks. Poorly written bug reports may delay developers when fixing bugs. However,no in-depth investigation has been conducted over the authorship characteristics. In this study, we first leverage byte-level N-grams to model the authorship characteristics and employ Normalized Simplified Profile Intersection（NSPI） to identify the similarity of the authorship characteristics. Then, we investigate a series of properties related to contributors’ authorship characteristics, including the evolvement over time and the variation among distinct products in open source projects. Moreover, we show how to leverage the authorship characteristics to facilitate a well-known task in software maintenance, namely Bug Report Summarization（BRS）. Experiments on open source projects validate that incorporating the authorship characteristics can effectively improve a stateof-the-art method in BRS. Our findings suggest that contributors should retain stable authorship characteristics and the authorship characteristics can assist in resolving software tasks.