Do time of day and developer experience affect commit bugginess

TitleDo time of day and developer experience affect commit bugginess
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsTan, L, Lam, P, Eyolfson, J
Tertiary Authorsvan Deursen, A, Xie, T, Zimmermann, T
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 8th working conference on Mining software repositories - MSR '11
Pagination153-162
Date Published05/2011
PublisherACM Press
Place PublishedNew York, New York, USA
ISBN Number9781450305747
Abstract

Modern software is often developed over many years with hundreds of thousands of commits. Commit metadata is a rich source of social characteristics, including the commit's time of day and the experience and commit frequency of its author. The "bugginess" of a commit is also a critical property of that commit. In this paper, we investigate the correlation between a commit's social characteristics and its "bugginess"; such results can be very useful for software developers and software engineering researchers. For instance, developers or code reviewers might be well-advised to thoroughly verify commits that are more likely to be buggy. In this paper, we study the correlation between a commit's bugginess and the time of day of the commit, the day of week of the commit, and the experience and commit frequency of the commit authors. We survey two widely-used open source projects: the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL.

Our main findings include: (1) commits submitted between midnight and 4 AM (referred to as late-night commits) are significantly buggier and commits between 7 AM and noon are less buggy, implying that developers may want to double-check their own latenight commits; (2) daily-committing developers produce less-buggy commits, indicating that we may want to promote the practice of daily-committing developers reviewing other developers' commits; and (3) the bugginess of commits versus day-of-week varies for different software projects.

Notes

"we study the latest versions of the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL, which have 222,332 and 31,098 commits, respectively. We study the correlation between a commit’s bugginess and the time of day of the commit, the day of week of the commit, and the experience and commit frequency of the commit authors. In addition, we study several other commit characteristics, such as comment-only fixes and bug lifetimes."

DOI10.1145/1985441.1985464
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