Who wrote that commit? An undergraduate thesis computes authorship rates inside Git projects
Laércio Silva de Sousa Júnior defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis investigating ways to compute developer authorship rates inside Git-versioned projects.
Brasília, December 11, 2018
Counting lines of code added by each developer sounds trivial. But any medium-sized project turns the sum into a trap: refactors shift apparent authorship, merges rewrite responsibilities, and a strong developer may remove more code than they produce. This is the puzzle Laércio Silva de Sousa Júnior dedicates his thesis to, defended in December 2018 at FCTE/UnB under the advising of Prof. André Luiz Peron Martins Lanna .
The work starts from a naive metric — the diff as a proxy for effort — and shows why it produces distorted portraits of real teams. The proposal replaces the raw sum with a context-sensitive authorship rate computed from Git history: code that survives, meaningful refactors, participation in critical blocks. The outcome is a more honest reading of contribution, useful both for team retrospectives and for architectural analysis and code governance instruments.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
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