Carnival

Finding who knows what in a git repository.

Abstract

Software projects are complex. They often contain large amounts of code spread among many developers. Furthermore, every developer may work on different parts of the project, resulting in developers being experts on different parts of the project. If a developer has a question about a certain snippet of code, who should the developer ask for help? We introduce a new problem: using the code base, the history of the code base, and a snippet of code, can we find and rank the relevant experts?

We introduce a method for finding and ranking relevant experts. We then discuss an experiment that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of our method and of developers’ judgements. And finally, we discuss possible improvements.

Read the rest of the paper here: http://cl.ly/2U41150c3k1z

Installing

$ python setup.py install

Using

from carnival import search

repo = search.Search("/path/to/repository/")
files = [’file1’, ’file2’]

lastcommits = {}
allcommits = {}
allcommitstime = {}

for f in files:
    lastcommits[f] = repo.score_last_commit(f)
    allcommits[f] = repo.score_all(f)
    allcommitstime[f] = repo.score_all_commits_over_time(f