Fat tails, long memory, maturity and ageing in open-source software projects
Physics and Society
2008-02-22 v1
Abstract
We report activity data analysis on several open source software projects, focusing on time between modifications and on the number of files modified at once. Both have fat-tailed distributions, long-term memory, and display systematic non-trivial cross-correlations, suggesting that quiet periods are followed by cascading modifications. In addition the maturity of a software project can be measured from the exponent of the distribution of inter-modification time. Finally, the dynamics of a single file displays ageing, the average rate of modifications decaying as a function of time following a power-law.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0802.3170,
title = {Fat tails, long memory, maturity and ageing in open-source software projects},
author = {Damien Challet and Sergi Valverde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0802.3170},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
14 pages, 18 figures. Feel free to ask one of the authors for a pdf file with high-quality figures