Why are commits being reverted? A comparative study of industrial and open source projects

Software development is a cyclic process of integrating new features while introducing and fixing defects. During development, commits that modify source code files are uploaded to version control systems. Occasionally, these commits need to be reverted, i.e., the code changes need to be completely backed out of the software project. While one can often speculate about the purpose of reverted commits (e.g., the commit may have caused integration or build problems), little empirical evidence exists to substantiate such claims. The goal of this paper is to better understand why commits are reverted in large software systems. To that end, we quantitatively and qualitatively study two proprietary and four open source projects to measure: (1) the proportion of commits that are reverted, (2) the amount of time that commits that are eventually reverted linger within a codebase, and (3) the most frequent reasons why commits are reverted. Our results show that 1%-5% of the commits in the studied systems are reverted. Those commits that are eventually reverted linger within the studied codebases for 1-35 days (median). Furthermore, we identify 13 common reasons for reverting commits, and observe that the frequency of reverted commits of each reason varies broadly from project to project. A complementary qualitative analysis suggests that many reverted commits could have been avoided with better team communication and change awareness. Our findings made Sony Mobile's stakeholders aware that internally reverted commits can be reduced by paying more attention to their own changes. On the other hand, externally reverted commits could be minimized only if external stakeholders are involved to improve inter-company communication or requirements elicitation.