Volatility metric to detect anomalies in source code repositories
Yegor Bugayenko · 2021
A new metric was introduced to calculate the distance between actively modified files in a source code repository and the files, which are rarely modified and may be considered abandoned or even dead. It was empirically demonstrated that larger repositories have larger values of the introduced metric. The metric may be used for earlier detection of code maintenance anomalies and helping software developers make the decision of splitting the repository into smaller ones in order to prevent maintainability issues.