A changeset-based approach to assess source code density and developer efficacy

The productivity of a (team of) developer(s) can be expressed as a ratio between effort and delivered functionality. Several different estimation models have been proposed. These are based on statistical analysis of real development projects; their accuracy depends on the number and the precision of data points. We propose a data-driven method to automate the generation of precise data points. Functionality is proportional to the code size and Lines of Code (LoC) is a fundamental metric of code size. However, code size and LoC are not well defined as they could include or exclude lines that do not affect the delivered functionality. We present a new approach to measure the density of code in software repositories. We demonstrate how the accuracy of development time spent in relation to delivered code can be improved when basing it on net- instead of the gross-size measurements. We validated our tool by studying ca. 1,650 open-source software projects.