Code Ownership in Open-Source Software
Matthieu Foucault, Jean-Rémy Falleri, Xavier Blanc
Context:
Ownership metrics measure how the workload of software modules is shared among their developers.
They have been shown to be accurate indicators of software quality.
Objective:
Since ownership metrics studies were done only on industrial software projects, we replicated such a study on Java free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects.
Our goal was to generalize an ``ownership law'' that stated that minor developers should be avoided.
Method:
We explored the relationship between ownership metrics and fault-proneness on seven FLOSS projects, using publicly available corpora to retrieve the fault-related information.
Results:
In our corpus, the relationship between ownership metrics and module faults is weak.
At best, less than half of projects exhibit a significant correlation, and at worst, no projects at all.
Moreover, fault-proneness seems to be much more influenced by module size than by ownership.
Conclusion:
The results of ownership studies done on closed-source projects do not generalize to FLOSS projects.
To understand the reasons for that, we performed an in-depth analysis and found that the lack of correlation between ownership metrics and module faults is due to the distributions of contributions among developers and the presence of ``heroes'' in FLOSS projects.
More information incoming...
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