Code Ownership: The Principles, Differences, and Their Associations with Software Quality

Code ownership–an approximation of the degree of ownership of a software component—is one of the important software measures used in quality improvement plans. However, prior studies proposed different variants of code ownership approximations. Yet, little is known about the difference in code ownership approximations and their association with software quality. In this paper, we investigate the differences in the commonly used ownership approximations (i.e., commit-based and line-based) in terms of the set of developers, the approximated code ownership values, and the expertise level. Then, we analyze the association of each code ownership approximation with the defect-proneness. Through an empirical study of 25 releases that span real-world open-source software systems, we find that commit-based and line-based ownership approximations produce different sets of developers, different code ownership values, and different sets of major developers. In addition, we find that the commit-based approximation has a stronger association with software quality than the line-based approximation. Based on our analysis, we recommend line-based code ownership be used for accountability purposes (e.g., authorship attribution, intellectual property), while commit-based code ownership should be used for rapid bug-fixing and charting quality improvement plans.