An Exploratory Study of Project Activity Changepoints in Open Source Software Evolution
This work addresses the understanding of project evolution patterns for open source software developers and researchers, but it is incremental as it primarily applies an existing method to new data.
The study investigated the prevalence of abrupt changes in activity within open source software projects, finding that over 90% of projects had between one and six changepoints, with increases and decreases occurring equally often.
To explore the prevalence of abrupt changes (changepoints) in open source project activity, we assembled a dataset of 8,919 projects from the World of Code. Projects were selected based on age, number of commits, and number of authors. Using the nonparametric PELT algorithm, we identified changepoints in project activity time series, finding that more than 90% of projects had between one and six changepoints. Increases and decreases in project activity occurred with roughly equal frequency. While most changes are relatively small, on the order of a few authors or few dozen commits per month, there were long tails of much larger project activity changes. In future work, we plan to focus on larger changes to search for common open source lifecycle patterns as well as common responses to external events.