Keep the Ball Rolling: Analyzing Release Cadence in GitHub Projects

Release cadence is the measure of time between software releases, both internal and external. Few studies analyze popular open-source projects’ release cadence and use. In this work, we gathered over 8,000 GitHub projects from four popular programming languages; Go, Java, Python, and Ruby. Project were categorized into slow, modern, rapid, and rapid+ release cadence groups. We determined that only 13% of projects had a rapid release cadence of under 30 days. Applying NLP and topic modeling, we extracted the top 5 frequent topics for programming languages and obtained insights into their common uses. For example, Go projects are commonly used for Kubernetes tooling, while Ruby projects often leverage Rails for web development. We observed no significant relationship between frequent topics and the release cadence categories. This finding suggests release cadences are independent of the type of software delivered for a programming language.