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.本研究旨在探究开发者如何在真实安卓（Android）项目中落地DevOps理念，并借助DevOps研究与评估（DevOps Research and Assessment, DORA）框架评估其实施成效。本次研究共分析了7441个安卓代码仓库，总计包含1983967次代码提交。依托提取得到的元数据，我们计算得到DORA框架下的核心性能指标，包括部署频率、变更前置时间、变更失败率与服务恢复时间，以此量化评估移动场景中的DevOps采纳情况。为补充上述分析，我们还衍生出一系列基于代码仓库的指标，用以近似表征与系统可靠性相关的维度，涵盖故障发生频率、恢复时长及预估可用性。此外，我们还对2000个抽样修订版本开展了定性人工分析，对开发者的各类活动进行分类，并将其映射至DevOps生命周期的各个阶段。