  Developers build all the software artifacts in development. Existing work has
studied the social behavior in software repositories. In one of the most
important software repositories, a bug repository, developers create and update
bug reports to support software development and maintenance. However, no prior
work has considered the priorities of developers in bug repositories. In this
paper, we address the problem of the developer prioritization, which aims to
rank the contributions of developers. We mainly explore two aspects, namely
modeling the developer prioritization in a bug repository and assisting
predictive tasks with our model. First, we model how to assign the priorities
of developers based on a social network technique. Three problems are
investigated, including the developer rankings in products, the evolution over
time, and the tolerance of noisy comments. Second, we consider leveraging the
developer prioritization to improve three predicted tasks in bug repositories,
i.e., bug triage, severity identification, and reopened bug prediction. We
empirically investigate the performance of our model and its applications in
bug repositories of Eclipse and Mozilla. The results indicate that the
developer prioritization can provide the knowledge of developer priorities to
assist software tasks, especially the task of bug triage.
