Bus Factor Analyzer

The tool is the result of the ongoing work published in the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (available for download at http://tinyurl.com/AssessingBusFactorForGitRepo). We would be very interested in getting feedback and helping people use it.

How To

In order to run the tool you need to perform some steps:

1. Install Gitana (https://github.com/valeriocos/Gitana)

2. Import your Git repository to Gitana, and export the file information to JSON

CONFIG = {
            'user': 'root',
            'password': 'root',
            'host': 'localhost',
            'port': '3306',
            'raise_on_warnings': False,
            'buffered': True
        }

g = Gitana(CONFIG)
g.init_db("YOUR-DB-NAME")
g.create_project("YOUR-DB-NAME", "YOUR-PROJECT-NAME")
g.import_git_data("YOUR-DB-NAME", "YOUR-PROJECT-NAME", "YOUR-REPO-NAME", "GIT-REPO-PATH")
g.export_json("YOUR-DB-NAME", "YOUR-REPO-NAME", "OUTPUT-PATH", references=["origin/master"])     

3. Launch the Bus Factor Analyzer GUI (https://github.com/valeriocos/BusFactor/blob/master/tool.py)

Settings

The Bus Factor Analyzer GUI allows you to tune the process to assess the bus factor for your Git repository. In particular you will be able to play with:

Primary developer knowledge

Primary developers are those developers that have modified a minimum percentage X of a software artifact (e.g., file, directory, branch, file extension) of the repository. By default, X is set to 1/D, where D is the overall number of developers that have ever modified the artifact. However, X can be changed to be, for instance, 1/2 (50% of the modifications over the artifact), 1/4 (25%) and so on.

Secondary developer knowledge

Secondary developers are those developers that know at least a proportion Y of what the primary developers know (X). By default, Y is set to half of X (0.5), however it can be changed to a value between 0 and 1. In case you don't want to use the secondary developer knowledge parameter, you can set Y to 1.

Metric

This parameter is used to combine the importance of the number and order of modifications to assign the knowledge value. Note that depending on the level of detail selected, the four metrics are initially calculated at file or line level (just for text files). Once the selected metric has been calculated, its calculation is repeated at each level of the repository to assign a bus factor value to each directory, branch, file extension and the repository itself.

• Last change. This metric assigns all knowledge of a line/file to the last developer that modified that line (or file for binary files).

• Multiple changes. This metric counts the number of times a line/file has been modified during the life-cycle of the project. It assigns more knowledge to the developers that modified the line/file most times.

• Distinct changes. This metric assesses the developer knowledge according to the number of non-consecutive changes on the line/file.

• Weighted distinct changes. This metric assesses the developer knowledge by relying of the previous metric modified to take into account the position of the modifications in the time-line evolution of the line/file. It is used to assign an incremental importance to the later modifications on the line/file.

Demo

A demo of the tool is available at https://github.com/atlanmod/busfactor_demo