Release Pattern Discovery: A Case Study of Database Systems

Studying the release-time activities of a software project - that is, activities that occur around the time of a major or minor release - can provide insights into both the development processes used and the nature of the system itself. Although tools rarely record detailed logs of developer behavior, we can infer release-time activities from available data, such as logs from revision control systems, bug tracking systems, etc. In this paper, we discuss the results of a case study in mining patterns of release-time behavior from the revision control systems of four open source database systems. We partitioned the development artifacts into four classes - source code, tests, build files, and documentation - to be able to characterize the behavioral patterns more precisely. We found, for example, that there were consistent activity patterns around release time within each of the individual projects; we also found that these patterns did not persist across systems, leading us to hypothesize that the four projects follow different but consistent development patterns of activity around releases.