The Empirical Commit Frequency Distribution of Open Source Projects
This provides insights for improving software development tools and validating assumptions, but is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The paper analyzed commit frequency distributions across open source projects to understand software development processes, finding differences based on project size and success, and deriving an activity indicator.
A fundamental unit of work in programming is the code contribution ("commit") that a developer makes to the code base of the project in work. An author's commit frequency describes how often that author commits. Knowing the distribution of all commit frequencies is a fundamental part of understanding software development processes. This paper presents a detailed quantitative analysis of commit frequencies in open-source software development. The analysis is based on a large sample of open source projects, and presents the overall distribution of commit frequencies. We analyze the data to show the differences between authors and projects by project size; we also includes a comparison of successful and non successful projects and we derive an activity indicator from these analyses. By measuring a fundamental dimension of programming we help improve software development tools and our understanding of software development. We also validate some fundamental assumptions about software development.