Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

Gunnar Kudrjavets; Nachiappan  Nagappan; Ayushi Rastogi

doi:10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00046

Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

Gunnar Kudrjavets
, Nachiappan Nagappan
, Ayushi Rastogi

Software Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › Academic › peer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

146 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects’ lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of 283,235 code reviews that cover, on average, seven years’ worth of development. Our main conclusion is that neither the passage of time or the project’s size impact code velocity. We find that (a) the duration of various code review periods (time-to-first-response, time-to-accept, and time-to-merge) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla either becomes shorter or stays the same; no directional trend is present for Blender, (b) an increase in the size of the code bases (annually 3–17%) does not accompany a decrease in code velocity, and (c) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla, the 30-day moving median stays in a fixed range for time-to-merge. These findings do not change with variabilities in code churn metrics, such as the number of commits or distinct authors of code changes

Original language	English
Title of host publication	2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)
Publisher	IEEE
Pages	267-271
Number of pages	5
ISBN (Electronic)	979-8-3503-1184-6
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00046
Publication status	Published - 12-Jul-2023
Event	20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories: MSR 2023 - Melbourne, Australia, Melbourne, Australia Duration: 15-May-2023 → 16-May-2023 https://conf.researchr.org/track/msr-2023/msr-2023-technical-papers

Conference

Conference	20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Abbreviated title	MSR 2023
Country/Territory	Australia
City	Melbourne
Period	15/05/2023 → 16/05/2023
Internet address	https://conf.researchr.org/track/msr-2023/msr-2023-technical-papers

Keywords

code review
code velocity
developer productivity

Access to Document

10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00046

Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code VelocitySubmitted manuscript, 604 KB
Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code VelocityFinal publisher's version, 1.21 MBLicence: Taverne

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.04293Licence: Other

Handle.net

Persistent link

1 Attending an event
1 Academic presentation

45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023)
Kudrjavets, G. (Attendee)
15-May-2023 → 19-May-2023
Activity: Organising and attending an event › Attending an event › Academic
Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity
Kudrjavets, G. (Speaker)
15-May-2023
Activity: Talk and presentation › Academic presentation › Academic

Cite this

@inproceedings{e9fe64ddbac74c7cb0aa0b13988c6237,

title = "Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity",

abstract = "This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects{\textquoteright} lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of 283,235 code reviews that cover, on average, seven years{\textquoteright} worth of development. Our main conclusion is that neither the passage of time or the project{\textquoteright}s size impact code velocity. We find that (a) the duration of various code review periods (time-to-first-response, time-to-accept, and time-to-merge) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla either becomes shorter or stays the same; no directional trend is present for Blender, (b) an increase in the size of the code bases (annually 3–17\%) does not accompany a decrease in code velocity, and (c) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla, the 30-day moving median stays in a fixed range for time-to-merge. These findings do not change with variabilities in code churn metrics, such as the number of commits or distinct authors of code changes",

keywords = "code review, code velocity, developer productivity",

author = "Gunnar Kudrjavets and Nachiappan Nagappan and Ayushi Rastogi",

year = "2023",

month = jul,

day = "12",

doi = "10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00046",

language = "English",

pages = "267--271",

booktitle = "2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)",

publisher = "IEEE",

note = "20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories : MSR 2023, MSR 2023 ; Conference date: 15-05-2023 Through 16-05-2023",

url = "https://conf.researchr.org/track/msr-2023/msr-2023-technical-papers",

}

Kudrjavets, G, Nagappan, N & Rastogi, A 2023, Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity. in 2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). IEEE, pp. 267-271, 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 15/05/2023. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00046

TY - GEN

T1 - Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

AU - Kudrjavets, Gunnar

AU - Nagappan, Nachiappan

AU - Rastogi, Ayushi

PY - 2023/7/12

Y1 - 2023/7/12

N2 - This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects’ lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of 283,235 code reviews that cover, on average, seven years’ worth of development. Our main conclusion is that neither the passage of time or the project’s size impact code velocity. We find that (a) the duration of various code review periods (time-to-first-response, time-to-accept, and time-to-merge) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla either becomes shorter or stays the same; no directional trend is present for Blender, (b) an increase in the size of the code bases (annually 3–17%) does not accompany a decrease in code velocity, and (c) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla, the 30-day moving median stays in a fixed range for time-to-merge. These findings do not change with variabilities in code churn metrics, such as the number of commits or distinct authors of code changes

AB - This paper investigates how the duration of various code review periods changes over a projects’ lifetime. We study four open-source software (OSS) projects: Blender, FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla. We mine and analyze the characteristics of 283,235 code reviews that cover, on average, seven years’ worth of development. Our main conclusion is that neither the passage of time or the project’s size impact code velocity. We find that (a) the duration of various code review periods (time-to-first-response, time-to-accept, and time-to-merge) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla either becomes shorter or stays the same; no directional trend is present for Blender, (b) an increase in the size of the code bases (annually 3–17%) does not accompany a decrease in code velocity, and (c) for FreeBSD, LLVM, and Mozilla, the 30-day moving median stays in a fixed range for time-to-merge. These findings do not change with variabilities in code churn metrics, such as the number of commits or distinct authors of code changes

KW - code review

KW - code velocity

KW - developer productivity

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M3 - Conference contribution

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BT - 2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

PB - IEEE

T2 - 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Y2 - 15 May 2023 through 16 May 2023

ER -

Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

Abstract

Conference

Keywords

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Activities

45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023)

Are We Speeding Up or Slowing Down? On Temporal Aspects of Code Velocity

Cite this