Authorship of Minor Contributors in Kubernetes Configuration Scripts: An Exploratory Study

Kubernetes is a popular open source software (OSS) tool to manage containers at scale. Despite being beneficial for rapid deployment, Kubernetes-based software deployments are susceptible to defects that can lead to serious consequences. A systematic analysis of development-related factors that cause defects can aid practitioners on how to mitigate these defects. We conduct an exploratory empirical study where we use causal analysis to quantify the impact of one development factor called minor contributors, which refers to practitioners who author <5% of the total code. By analyzing 29,028 commits from 157 OSS repositories, we observe (i) 5.6% of the 29,028 commits to be authored by minor contributors; and (ii) authorship of minor contributors to impact defects in configuration scripts. Based on our findings, we recommend researchers to (1) further investigate the characteristics of minor contributors; and (2) identify other development-related factors that may have a causal impact on defects in Kubernetes configuration scripts.