MINCE: Mining change history of Android project

Abstract

An analysis of commit history of Android reveals that Android has a code base of 550K files, where on an average each file has been modified 8.7 times. 41% of files have been modified at-least once. In terms of contributors, it has an overall contributor community of 1563, with 58.5% of them having made >; 5 commits. Moreover, the contributor community shows high churn levels, with only 13 of contributors continuing from 2005 to 2011. In terms of industry participation, Google & Android account for 22% of developers. Intel and RedHat account for 2% of contributors each and IBM, Oracle, TI, SGI account for another 1% each. Android code can be classified into 5 sub-projects: kernel, platform, device, tools and toolchain. In this paper, we profile each of these sub-projects in terms of change volumes, contributor and industry participation. We further picked specific framework topics such as UI, security, whose understanding is required from perspective of developing apps over Android, and present some insights on community participation around the same.