Software Engineering Meets Deep Learning: A Literature Review

Deep learning (DL) is being used nowadays in many traditional software engineering (SE) problems and tasks, such as software documentation, defect prediction, and software testing. However, since the renaissance of DL techniques is still very recent, we lack works that summarize and condense the most recent and relevant research conducted in the intersection of DL and SE. Therefore, in this paper we describe the first results of a literature review covering 81 papers about DL & SE.

Identifying Experts in Software Libraries and Frameworks among GitHub Users

Software development increasingly depends on libraries and frameworks to increase productivity and reduce time-to-market. Despite this fact, we still lack techniques to assess developers expertise in widely popular libraries and frameworks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of unsupervised (based on clustering) and supervised machine learning classifiers (Random Forest and SVM) to identify experts in three popular JavaScript libraries: facebook/react, mongodb/node-mongodb, and socketio/socket.io. First, we collect 13 features about developers activity on GitHub projects, including commits on source code files that depend on these libraries. We also build a ground truth including the expertise of 575 developers on the studied libraries, as self-reported by them in a survey. Based on our findings, we document the challenges of using machine learning classifiers to predict expertise in software libraries, using features extracted from GitHub. Then, we propose a method to identify library experts based on clustering feature data from GitHub; by triangulating the results of this method with information available on Linkedin profiles, we show that it is able to recommend dozens of GitHub users with evidences of being experts in the studied JavaScript libraries. We also provide a public dataset with the expertise of 575 developers on the studied libraries.