Dynamics of Open-Source Software Developer's Commit Behavior: An Empirical Investigation of Subversion

Abstract: 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 (i.e., the waiting time between two consecutive commits). In this paper, we investigated software developer's collective and individual commit behavior in terms of the distribution of commit intervals, and found that 1) the data sets of project-level commit interval within both the lifecycle and each release of the projects analyzed roughly follow power-law distributions; and 2) lifecycle- and release-level collective commit interval on class files can also be best fitted with power laws. These findings reveal some general (collective) collaborative development patterns of OSS projects, e.g., most of the waiting times between two consecutive commits to a central repository are short, but only a few of them experience a long duration of waiting. Then, the implications of what we found for OSS research were outlined, which could provide an insight into understanding OSS development processes better based on software developers' historical commit behavior.