The birth, growth, death and rejuvenation of software maintenance communities

Background: Though much research has been conducted to investigate software maintenance activities, there has been little work charactering maintenance files as a community and exploring the evolution of this community. Aims: The goal of our research is to identify maintenance communities and monitor their evolution-birth, growth, death and rejuvenation. Method: In this paper, we leveraged a social community detection algorithm---clique prelocation method (CPM)---to identify file communities. Then we implemented an algorithm to detect new communities, active communities, inactive communities and reactivated communities by cumulatively detecting and constantly comparing communities in time sequences. Results: Based on our analysis of 14 open-source projects, we found that new communities are mostly caused by bug and improvement issues. An active community can be vigorous, on and off, through the entire life of a system, and so does an inactive community. In addition, an inactive community can be reactivated again, mostly through bug issues. Conclusions: These findings add to our understanding of software maintenance communities and help us identify the most expensive maintenance spots by identifying constantly active communities.