Title
How Do Contributors Impact Code Naturalness? An Exploratory Study of 50 Python Projects
Abstract
Recent studies have shown how software is comparable to natural languages, meaning that source code is highly repetitive and predictable. Other studies have shown the naturalness as indicators for code quality (i.e., buggy code). With the rise of social coding and the popularity of open source projects, the software is now being built with contributions that come from contributors from diverse backgrounds. From this social contribution perspective, we explore how contributors impact code naturalness. In detail, our exploratory study investigators whether the developers' history of programming language experience affects the code naturalness. Calculating the code naturalness of 678 contributors from 50 open-source python projects, we analyze how two aspects of contributor activities impact the code naturalness: (a) the number of contributors in a software project, (b) diversity of programming language contributions. The results show that the code naturalness is affected by the diversity of contributors and that more collaborative software tends to be less predictable. This exploratory study serves as evidence into the relationship between code naturalness and the programming diversity of contributors.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/IWESEP49350.2019.00010
2019 10th International Workshop on Empirical Software Engineering in Practice (IWESEP)
Keywords
Field
DocType
code naturalness, programming language diversity, developer experience
Data science,Source code,Collaborative software,Computer science,Naturalness,Software,Natural language,Software quality,Exploratory research,Python (programming language)
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2333-519X
978-1-7281-5591-3
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8