A Deep Looking at the Code Changes in OpenHarmony

Yuqing Niu, Lu Zhou, Zhe Liu

Abstract: Open-source software has attracted more and more attention from practitioners. At the same time, many Chinese tech companies are embracing open source and opting for open source projects. Most previous research has focused on international companies such as Microsoft or Google, while the actual value of open source projects by Chinese tech companies remains unclear. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical study examining patch information for HarmonyOS. We collected a total of 234,791 commits from 2008 to March 2021. We manually screened out 3,616 submissions about bug fixes. The key findings include: 1) the percentage of bugs decreases rapidly as the number of modified source files increases. 2) About 70% of all bug types of modifications contain only one hunk. 3) About 50% of the bugs can be fixed by modifying one line of code.4) The programmer did not add any files to fix more than 80% of the bugs, Also did not delete any files to fix more than 90% of bugs. Our findings provide direction for software engineering researchers and practical recommendations for software developers and Huawei Technologies.