Context Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the same label, we have consensus. Results We estimate that between 17% and 32% of all changes in bug fixing commits modify the source code to fix the underlying problem. However, when we only consider changes to the production code files this ratio increases to 66% to 87%. We find that about 11% of lines are hard to label leading to active disagreements between participants. Due to confirmed tangling and the uncertainty in our data, we estimate that 3% to 47% of data is noisy without manual untangling, depending on the use case. Conclusion Tangled commits have a high prevalence in bug fixes and can lead to a large amount of noise in the data. Prior research indicates that this noise may alter results. As researchers, we should be skeptics and assume that unvalidated data is likely very noisy, until proven otherwise.

A GitHub profile is becoming an essential part of a developer's resume enabling HR departments to extract someone's expertise, through automated analysis of his/her contribution to open-source projects. At the same time, having clear insights on the technologies used in a project can be very beneficial for resource allocation and project maintainability planning. In the literature, one can identify various approaches for identifying expertise on programming languages, based on the projects that developer contributed to. In this paper, we move one step further and introduce an approach (ac-companied by a tool) to identify low-level expertise on particular software frameworks and technologies apart, relying solely on GitHub data, using the GitHub API and Natural Language Processing (NLP)-using the Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). In particular, we developed an NLP model in LUIS for named-entity recognition for three (3). NET technologies and two (2) front-end frameworks. Our analysis is based upon specific commit contents, in terms of the exact code chunks, which the committer added or changed. We evaluate the precision, recall and f-measure for the derived technologies/frameworks, by conducting a batch test in LUIS and report the results. The proposed approach is demonstrated through a fully functional web application named RepoSkillMiner.

Context: Tangled commits are changes to software that address multiple concerns at once. For researchers interested in bugs, tangled commits mean that they actually study not only bugs, but also other concerns irrelevant for the study of bugs. Objective: We want to improve our understanding of the prevalence of tangling and the types of changes that are tangled within bug fixing commits. Methods: We use a crowd sourcing approach for manual labeling to validate which changes contribute to bug fixes for each line in bug fixing commits. Each line is labeled by four participants. If at least three participants agree on the same label, we have consensus. Results: We estimate that between 17\% and 32\% of all changes in bug fixing commits modify the source code to fix the underlying problem. However, when we only consider changes to the production code files this ratio increases to 66\% to 87\%. We find that about 11\% of lines are hard to label leading to active disagreements between participants. Due to confirmed tangling and the uncertainty in our data, we estimate that 3\% to 47\% of data is noisy without manual untangling, depending on the use case. Conclusion: Tangled commits have a high prevalence in bug fixes and can lead to a large amount of noise in the data. Prior research indicates that this noise may alter results. As researchers, we should be skeptics and assume that unvalidated data is likely very noisy, until proven otherwise.