Predicting Programming Behavior in OSS Communities: A Case Study of NLP-based Approach

Prediction of developers’ programming behaviors is an effective way to improve their development efficiency and optimize the organization of project modules and files. However, little research exists investigating on this direction. In order to address this knowledge gap, we proposed a NLP-based approach to predict the programming behaviors in OSS (Open Source Software) communities. The proposed approach i) embeds the historical programming behavior data of a project into a multi-dimensional vector space to capture the potential laws in the data, ii) forms an eigenvector matrix reflecting the semantic relationship of the development behavior data, and iii) predicts the next programming behavior of a specific developer based on the eigenvector matrix. Our experiments on five OSS projects show that the prediction accuracy rate of the proposed prediction approach can reach up to about 50%, indicating that it can summarize the development behavior data law and effectively predict the programming behavior of developers. Our work can provide valuable assistance for developers’ programming and projects’ maintenance in practice.