Dynamics of open-source software developer's commit behavior
Yutao Ma, Yang Wu, Youwei Xu · 2014
Commit is an important operation of revision control for open-source software (OSS). Recent research has been pursued to explore the statistical laws of such an operation, but few of those papers conduct empirical investigations on commit interval. In this paper, we investigated the dynamics of software developers' collective commit behavior in terms of the distribution of commit intervals, and found that the data sets of project-level and file-level collective commit interval within both the lifecycle and each release of the projects under discussion roughly follow power-law distributions. The implications of what we found for OSS research were outlined, which could provide an insight into understanding OSS development processes better.