Résumé
Empirical software engineering has leveraged open software repositories to profile and categorize project contributors. The objective of our work is to conduct a similar but original study, focused on architectural contributions, to evaluate the profiles of contributors playing this specific development role and their evolution over time. This paper presents an approach to study a first kind of architectural contributions: deployment descriptors that define runtime architectures of applications. A categorization model is proposed, reflecting the importance of contributions based on data mined from code repositories (contents, timestamps, authors, etc.). Then, it groups contributors in several categories (profiles) and studies their evolution in projects over time. A case study is conducted on a selected long-life, quality project. It shows that the specific architectural development responsibility we measure is chosen and sustained by experienced and committed contributors. As a proof of concept, these results are very promising and will lead to broader scale studies in order to classify projects based on their management policies regarding architectural contributors.