Browsing by Subject "Bus factor"

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    Augmenting bus factor analysis with visualization
    (2024-01) Ahmed, Muhammad Umair
    ‘Bus factor’, also known as ‘truck factor’, is a measure of how vulnerable a software project is based on the minimum number of people who would have to leave the project (be ‘hit by a bus’) for it to stall. There is existing research on how to calculate bus factor for software projects but limited work on visualizing the bus factor. We believe providing visualization along with conventionally provided numerical bus factor results will help decision-makers manage the workload and knowledge distribution across the project and also help in planning and hiring decisions. This thesis proposes, implements, and evaluates a tool named BFViz to visualize bus factor and contributions for software projects from pre-processed Git history. It is a web application that provides a file-browser-like interface with an interactively navigable treemap. Additionally, it has filename-based filtering, individual contribution data for files and folders, and simulation of contributor departure. The tool is validated with a round of four user evaluations where users, ranging from project owners and engineering managers to developers, complete tasks using the tool on an open-source project that they are involved in and provide feedback with a semi-structured interview and a feature ranking activity. The overall task completion rate for the tasks was 79.55%. All case study participants preferred BFViz over text reports to understand bus factor data. The top three features, by mean ranking, were the contributors’ list, the files and folders’ visualization, and the simulation mode.
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    BFSig: leveraging file significance in bus factor estimation
    (Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2023) Haratian, Vahid; Evtikhiev, M.; Derakhshanfar, P.; Tüzün, Eray; Kovalenko, V.
    Software projects experience the departure of developers due to various reasons. As developers are one of the main sources of knowl edge in software projects, their absence will inevitably result in a certain degree of knowledge depletion. Bus Factor (BF) is a met ric to evaluate how this knowledge loss can affect the project’s continuity
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    ItemOpen Access
    Bus factor explorer
    (IEEE, 2023-11-08) Klimov, E.; Ahmed, Muhammad Umair; Sviridov, N.; Derakhshanfar, P.; Tüzün, Eray; Kovalenko, V.
    Bus factor (BF) is a metric that tracks knowledge distribution in a project. It is the minimal number of engineers that have to leave for a project to stall. Despite the fact that there are several algorithms for calculating the bus factor, only a few tools allow easy calculation of bus factor and convenient analysis of results for projects hosted on Git-based providers. We introduce Bus Factor Explorer, a web application that provides an interface and an API to compute, export, and explore the Bus Factor metric via treemap visualization, simulation mode, and chart editor. It supports repositories hosted on GitHub and enables functionality to search repositories in the interface and process many repositories at the same time. Our tool allows users to identify the files and subsystems at risk of stalling in the event of developer turnover by analyzing the VCS history. The application and its source code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/bus-factor-explorer. The demonstration video can be found on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uIoV79N14z8