The Empirical Commit Frequency Distribution of Open Source Projects
Abstract
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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1408.4978,
title = {The Empirical Commit Frequency Distribution of Open Source Projects},
author = {Carsten Kolassa and Dirk Riehle and Michel A. Salim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.4978},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
8 pages, 7 figures. WikiSym '13 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration