  Software projects are regularly updated with new functionality and bug fixes
through so-called releases. In recent years, many software projects have been
shifting to shorter release cycles and this can affect the bug handling
activity. Past research has focused on the impact of switching from traditional
to rapid release cycles with respect to bug handling activity, but the effect
of the rapid release cycle duration has not yet been studied. We empirically
investigate releases of 420 open source projects with rapid release cycles to
understand the effect of variable and rapid release cycle durations on bug
handling activity. We group the releases of these projects into five categories
of release cycle durations. For each project, we investigate how the sequence
of releases is related to bug handling activity metrics and we study the effect
of the variability of cycle durations on bug fixing. Our results did not reveal
any statistically significant difference for the studied bug handling activity
metrics in the presence of variable rapid release cycle durations. This
suggests that the duration of fast release cycles does not seem to impact bug
handling activity.
