Analyzing distributions of emails and commits from OSS contributors through mining software repositories: An exploratory study

Context: Distributed software development is a modern practice in software industry. This is especially true in Open Source Software (OSS) community. In this context, developers are normally distributed around the world. In addition, most of them work for free and without or with low coordinating. Understanding how developers' practices are on those projects may guide communities to successfully manage their projects. Goal: We mined two repositories of the Apache Httpd project in order to gather information about its developers' behavior. Method: We developed an approach to cross data gathered from mail list and source code repository through mining techniques. The approach uses software visualization to analyze the mined data. We conducted an experimental evaluation of the approach to assess the behavioral patterns from OSS development community. Results: Our results show Apache developers' behavior patterns. In addition, we deepen the analysis of the Preferred Representational System of four top developers presented by Colaço et. al in (Colaço et al., 2010). Conclusion: The use of data mining and software visualization to analyze data from different sources can spot important properties of development processes.