Abstract
Recently the impact of developers’ behavior on the evolution of open-source software (OSS) has become a hot topic. When does the developer commit his/her code? Is there any regularity of the time distribution of commit along the lifecycles of open-source project? Will the change of the core member in a development team has an impact on software evolution process? We are quite interested in these above questions so we conducted an empirical study in this paper. We collect more than 50,000 commits from 6 open-source software in Github and design a formula to measure the contributor’s contribution value. We then take four major experiments to analyze some issues about inert intervals and the impact of the change of main contributors on software evolution. To make the result visible, we also design an automatic mining tool which can automatically mine the metadata from specified repository and make it graphically presented. Through the experiments we gained some interesting findings such as there is no inevitable statistical connection between a contributor’s inert interval and his contribution value, and main contributors’ change has a huge impact on the software evolution. We believe that these findings will have deeper research significance in the future.
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Acknowledgement
This work is partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (Grant No. BK20140611), the Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61272080,61403187). All support is gratefully acknowledged.
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Zhou, H., Xu, L., Li, Y. (2019). Mining the Contributions Along the Lifecycles of Open-Source Projects. In: Li, Z., Jiang, H., Li, G., Zhou, M., Li, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Methodology for Emerging Domains. NASAC NASAC 2017 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 861. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0310-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0310-8_10
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