Employing Contribution and Quality Metrics for Quantifying the Software Development Process

ABSTRACTThe full integration of online repositories in contemporary software development promotes remote work and collaboration. Apart from the apparent benefits, online repositories offer a deluge of data that can be utilized to monitor and improve the software development process. Towards this direction, we have designed and implemented a platform that analyzes data from GitHub in order to compute a series of metrics that quantify the contributions of project collaborators, both from a development as well as an operations (communication) perspective. We analyze contributions throughout the projects' lifecycle and track the number of coding violations, this way aspiring to identify cases of software development that need closer monitoring and (possibly) further actions to be taken. In this context, we have analyzed the 3000 most popular GitHub Java projects and provide the data to the community.