Week 8 Status

Major and Minor Contributors Overview

Our idea for major and minor contributors stems from Chris Birds’ 2011 publication ‘Don’t Touch My Code! Examining the Effect of Ownership on Software QUality’. Here, Chris used developers contribution percentage to a component to relate that minor contributors to some components will be major contributors to others through dependency relationships. He narrowed his specification of contribution to the number of changes rather then the actual number of lines modified. He defined a major contributor as one who has contributed 5% or more changes and minor below 5%. We followed suit with the definition of Major and Minor but simply adapted contribution definition be that commit count. Ours is a comparative study, comparing our owners files to major and minor contributors.

This project is sponsored by the Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation.