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HICSS
2009
IEEE

The Commit Size Distribution of Open Source Software

14 years 4 months ago
The Commit Size Distribution of Open Source Software
With the growing economic importance of open source, we need to improve our understanding of how open source software development processes work. The analysis of code contributions to open source projects is an important part of such research. In this paper we analyze the size of code contributions to more than 9,000 open source projects. We review the total distribution and distinguish three categories of code contributions using a size-based heuristic: single focused commits, aggregate team contributions, and repository refactorings. We find that both the overall distribution and the individual categories follow a power law. We also suggest that distinguishing these commit categories by size will benefit future analyses.
Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle
Added 19 May 2010
Updated 19 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where HICSS
Authors Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle
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