Does the duration of rapid release cycles affect the bug handling activity?

TL;DR

This study empirically examines 420 open source projects to determine if the length of rapid release cycles influences bug handling activity, finding no significant impact of cycle duration variability.

Contribution

It is the first large-scale empirical analysis to explore how the duration of rapid release cycles affects bug handling activity in open source projects.

Findings

No significant difference in bug handling metrics across different release cycle durations.

Variability in rapid release cycle lengths does not impact bug fixing activity.

Study based on 420 open source projects with diverse release schedules.

Abstract

Software projects are regularly updated with new functionality and bug fixes through so-called releases. In recent years, many software projects have been shifting to shorter release cycles and this can affect the bug handling activity. Past research has focused on the impact of switching from traditional to rapid release cycles with respect to bug handling activity, but the effect of the rapid release cycle duration has not yet been studied. We empirically investigate releases of 420 open source projects with rapid release cycles to understand the effect of variable and rapid release cycle durations on bug handling activity. We group the releases of these projects into five categories of release cycle durations. For each project, we investigate how the sequence of releases is related to bug handling activity metrics and we study the effect of the variability of cycle durations on bug fixing. Our results did not reveal any statistically significant difference for the studied bug handling activity metrics in the presence of variable rapid release cycle durations. This suggests that the duration of fast release cycles does not seem to impact bug handling activity.