Effectiveness of exploring historical commits for developer recommendation: an empirical study

Developer recommendation is an essential task for resolving incoming issues in the evolution of software. Many developer recommendation techniques have been developed in the literature; among these studies, most techniques usually combined historical commits as supplementary information with bug repositories and/or source-code repositories to recommend developers. However, the question of whether the messages in historical commits are always useful has not yet been answered. This article aims at solving this problem by conducting an empirical study on four open-source projects. The results show that: (1) the number of meaningful words of the commit description has an impact on the quality of the commit, and a larger number of meaningful words in the description means that it can generally better reflect developers’ expertise; (2) using commit description to recommend the relevant developers is better than that using relevant files that are recorded in historical commits; (3) developers tend to change the relevant files that they have changed many times before; (4) developers generally tend to change the files that they have changed recently.