Release Pattern Discovery: A Case Study of Database Systems

Studying the release-time activities of a software project — that is, activities that occur around the time of a major or minor release — can provide insights into both the development processes used and the nature of the system itself. Although tools rarely record detailed logs of developer behavior, we can infer release-time activities from available data, such as logs from revision control systems, bug tracking systems, etc. In this paper, we discuss the results of a case study in mining patterns of release-time behavior from the revision control systems of four open source database systems. We partitioned the development artifacts into four classes — source code, tests, build files, and documentation — to be able to characterize the behavioral patterns more precisely. We found, for example, that there were consistent activity patterns around release time within each of the individual projects; we also found that these patterns did not persist across systems, leading us to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Abram Hindle, Michael W. Godfrey, Richard C. Holt
• Keywords: Consistent Activity Patterns, ICSM 2007, Release-time Activities, Revision Control Systems, Software Engineering