Developer Apologies

Description

Scripts to facilitate discovery and analysis of developer apologies in GitHub issues, commits, and pull requests.

Motivation

To better understand the lead-up to a vulnerability, we are exploring the concept of "mistakes". While the research world has taxonomies of technical, software weaknesses, we lack a robust understanding of human mistakes. Behind every vulnerability is a set of mistakes, and one way to identify mistakes are when people apologize. These self-admitted mistakes allow us to cluster and discover the many different types of mistakes in software development. We are developing an "apology miner" that uses natural language processing techniques to identify apology sentences in GitHub comments from issues, pull requests, and commits. Our miner will build this corpus of apologies, and then we will use word embedding to identify similarly-phrased clusters of apology phrases. We will take those clusters and map them to existing taxonomies of human error in the field of psychology.

Dependencies

System Dependencies

NOTE: This code has been implemented and tested on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS. It should run on any Linux system. We cannot make any guarantees for Windows.

• libhdf5-dev 1.10.4+
• Python 3.6+

Python Dependencies

To install python dependencies, run: pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

Setup

GitHub API Token

To run this code, you need to acquire a GitHub API Token by following these directions.

For scope, do not select any checkboxes.

Copy your API Token into github_api_token.txt.

Testing

To run unit tests, execute ./test.sh from the root directory of the repository.

NOTE: You may need to make test.sh executable: chmod ug+x test.sh.

Usage

usage: main.py [-h] {download,load,delete,info_data,info_hdf5,info_rate_limit} ...

Scripts to facilitate downloading data from GitHub, loading it into an HDF5 file, and analyzing
the data.

positional arguments:
  {download,load,delete,info_data,info_hdf5,info_rate_limit}
                        Available commands.
    download            Download data from GitHub repositories using the GraphQL API.
    load                Load downloaded data into an HDF5 file.
    delete              Delete local CSV data from disk. This command cannot be used to delete
                        the HDF5 file.
    info_data           Display info about the downloaded data.
    info_hdf5           Display info about the data loaded into HDF5.
    info_rate_limit     Display rate limiting info from GitHub's GraphQL API.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Download Command

This command downloads the specified data and saves it in CSV format to disk (in the specified data_dir). This command is a prerequisite for the load command.

usage: main.py download [-h] repo_file {issues,pull_requests,commits,all} data_dir

positional arguments:
  repo_file             The path for a file containing GitHub repository URLs to download
                        data from. This file should contain a single repo URL per line.
                        Relative paths will be canonicalized.
  {issues,pull_requests,commits,all}
                        The type of data to download from the given repositories. All of
                        the relevant metadata, including comments will be downloaded for
                        whichever option is given.
  data_dir              The path for a directory to save the downloaded data to. Relative
                        paths will be canonicalized. Downloaded data will be in the form
                        of a CSV file and placed in a subdirectory, e.g. data_dir/issues/.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Load Command

This command loads data from the specified data_dir into the specified HDF5 file.

NOTE: This command is not yet implemented.

usage: main.py load [-h] hdf5_file data_dir

positional arguments:
  hdf5_file   The path/name of the HDF5 file to create and load with data. Relative paths
              will be canonicalized.
  data_dir    The path to a directory where data is downloaded and ready to be loaded.
              Relative paths will be canonicalized.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Delete Command

This command deletes CSV data from the specified data_dir.

usage: main.py delete [-h] data_dir

positional arguments:
  data_dir    The path for a directory containing downloaded data. Relative paths will be
              canonicalized.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Info_Data Command

This command prints useful information about the downloaded CSV data.

NOTE: This command is not yet implemented.

usage: main.py info_data [-h] data_dir

positional arguments:
  data_dir    The path for a directory containing downloaded data. Relative paths will be
              canonicalized.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Info_HDF5 Command

This command prints useful information about the data loaded into the HDF5 file.

NOTE: This command is not yet implemented.

usage: main.py info_hdf5 [-h] hdf5_file

positional arguments:
  hdf5_file   The path/name of an HDF5 file. Relative paths will be canonicalized.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Info_Rate_Limit Command

This command prints out rate limit information for GitHub's GraphQL API.

usage: main.py info_rate_limit [-h]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

License

MIT License.

Contact

• Benjamin S. Meyers <bsm9339@rit.edu>