Mining Handover Process in Open Source Development: An Exploratory Study

Background: Handover is a common process in all software development projects. It is one of the most complex and diverse processes in software life cycle which could have a negative impact on software quality and progress. In open source software (OSS) development, handover is a more critical task due to poor planning. Objective: The goal of this work is to investigate whether we can automatically identify the handover process in OSS development. Furthermore, we aim to mine the process of handover and identify the factors and their influences on the duration of handover process. Method: We propose an ADC metric and an HDI algorithm to automatically identify the handover process and conduct a brief survey to evaluate it. We apply the Heuristic mining algorithm to discover the process maps of handover by mining Github repositories. To identify the factors from a large set of variables, we employ the Stepwise regression method. Results: We identified 63 pairs of handover within 44 projects from 314 most popular projects using our proposed method. Our survey received 21 responses. Conclusion: This study confirms that handover can be identified automatically. Although handover processes vary, developers follow a common work-flow during handover. The number of lines of code is positively correlated to the duration of handover process.