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A Comparison of Three Algorithms for Computing Truck Factors (ICPC 2017)

A Comparison of Three Algorithms for Computing Truck Factors (ICPC 2017)

Truck Factor (also known as Bus Factor or Lottery Number) is the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or leave) before a project is incapacitated. Therefore, it is a measure that reveals the concentration of knowledge and the key developers in a project. Due to the importance of this information to project managers, algorithms were proposed to automatically compute Truck Factors, using maintenance activity data extracted from version control systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, we still lack studies that compare the accuracy of the results produced by such algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate and compare the results of three Truck Factor algorithms. To this end, we empirically determine the truck factors of 35 open-source systems by consulting their developers. Our results show that two algorithms are very accurate, especially when the systems have a small Truck Factor. We also evaluate the impact of different thresholds and configurations in algorithm results.

ASERG, DCC, UFMG

May 23, 2017
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  1. A Comparison of Three Algorithms for Computing Truck Factors Mívian

    Ferreira¹, Marco Tulio Valente¹ and Kecia Ferreira² ¹UFMG, Belo Horizonte - Brazil ²CEFET-MG, Belo Horizonte - Brazil ICPC 2017
  2. Truck Factor The  minimal  number  of  developers  that  have  to

     be   hit  by  a  truck  (or  leave)  to  put  a  project  in  trouble   4
  3. Goal To  compare  three  well-­‐known  algorithms  for   measuring  Truck

     Factors         5 AVL Avelino et al. (ICPC 2016) RIG Rigby et al. (ICSE 2016) CST Cosentino et al. (SANER 2015)
  4. Research Questions RQ1.  How  accurate  are  the  results  provided  by

     each  algorithm?     RQ2.  How  accurate  is  the  idenEficaEon  of  TF  developers?       RQ3.  What  is  the  impact  of  different  thresholds/configuraEons?     6
  5. AVL •  Greedy  heurisEc   •  Commit-­‐based   •  Uses

     DOA  (Degree-­‐of-­‐Authorship)  (Fritz  et  al.  ICSE  2010,  TOSEM  2014)   •  Simulates  the  removal  of  the  top-­‐authors  unEl  50%  of  the  files   become  abandoned   “A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors”, Avelino et al. ICPC 2016 7
  6. RIG •  Blame  approach:  considers  the  author  who  last  changed

     a  line   •  Abandoned  line:  a  line  last  changed  by  a  developer  who  le]   •  Abandoned  file:  at  least  90%  of  its  lines  are  abandoned     9 “Quantifying and mitigating turnover-induced knowledge loss: case studies of Chrome and a project at Avaya”, Rigby et al. ICSE 2016
  7. CST •  CST’s  authors  do  not  provide  a  detailed  algorithm,

     but  a  tool   •  CST  first  computes  the  Truck  Factor  at  the  file  level   •  The  final  result  combines  the  Truck  Factor  of  each  file   12 “Assessing the bus factor of Git repositories”, Cosentino et al. SANER 2015
  8. CST •  To compute knowledge on a file, CST considers

    2 metrics: •  Last change takes it all (LCTA): authorship on a file is assigned to the last developer who modified it •  Multiple changes equally considered (MCEC): authorship on a file is assigned to the author with the highest number of commits 13 “Assessing the bus factor of Git repositories”, Cosentino et al. SANER 2015
  9. Dataset •  35 GitHub systems: •  6 most popular languages

    •  27 systems from AVL dataset •  8 new systems 14
  10. Oracle of Truck Factors •  Survey with the main developers

    of the systems •  We only accepted responses from top 10 developers •  Truck Factor number and Truck Factor sets 15
  11. How... 17 Error of TF estimated by each algorithm, compared

    to oracle values | Error | = TFalgorithm - TForacle
  12. How... 20 Analysis of True Positives (TP), False Positives (FP)

    and False Negatives (FN) Precision = TP / (TP U FP) Recall = TP / (TP U FN) F-measure = (2 * P * R) / (P+R)
  13. How... •  AVL: variation of threshold on abandoned file (0.1

    to 1.0) •  RIG: variation of the number of random samples of developers (1,000 to 10,000) •  CST: change the knowledge metrics (LCTA and MCEC) 25
  14. Results 27 Increasing the number of tested samples does not

    have a major positive impact on RIG results. RIG
  15. Results 28 MCEC (multiple changes equally considered) is the knowledge

    metric that leads to the best results on CST
  16. Conclusion 29 1.  AVL and CST are the most accurate

    algorithms 2.  AVL is the most accurate algorithm to predict the Truck Factor sets, closely followed by CST 3.  The best threshold for AVL is 50%
  17. Conclusion 30 4.  RIG has a non-deterministic behavior and changing

    the number of samples has a minor impact on its results 5.  The Multiple Changes Equally Considered (MCEC) used by CST to infer code knowledge leads to the best results
  18. Thanks for your attention! A Comparison of Three Algorithms for

    Computing Truck Factors Mívian Ferreira¹, Marco Tulio Valente¹ and Kecia Ferreira² [email protected] ICPC 2017