Are 15% of all commits fixes? (2025)

A new employee examined various statistics of a programming repository after gaining access. Among the investigated metrics were the age of the repository, the total number of commits, the most frequent committers, the files altered the most, the use of merge-commits or a linear history. Of particular interest was the proportion of "fix" commits, which the employee referred to as the "fix-ratio".

Across multiple productionized software projects, this fix-ratio commonly appeared around 15%. Intrigued, the reporter sought out a list of popular repositories on GitHub. After processing the data of 200 repositories, the fix-ratio was found to be closer to 10% rather than the previously assumed 15%. The variation in results across the sample of repositories highlights the inconsistency in the fix-ratio.

The employee concludes that if a project maintains a fix-ratio between 10% and 20%, the team likely experiences a smooth operation. However, if the ratio is lower, the project may be struggling and the team may face frequent urgent fixes during the night.