Repository-Visible DevOps Practices and Delivery Performance in Mobile Application Development: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Android Repositories

This study investigates how developers implement DevOps principles in real-world Android projects and evaluates their impact using the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) framework. We analyzed 7,441 Android repositories, comprising 1,983,967 commits. Leveraging the extracted metadata, we computed key DORA performance metrics, i.e., deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service, to quantitatively assess DevOps adoption in mobile contexts. To complement this analysis, we derive a set of repository-based indicators that approximate reliability-related aspects, such as failure frequency, recovery time, and estimated availability.In addition, we conducted a qualitative manual analysis of 2,000 sampled revisions to classify developer activities and map them to the phases of the DevOps lifecycle.