Can Machine Learning be applied in software developement
Definately - Yes.
Good question. 
Was thinking about it myself.

(1) Collect the data.
The first problem you have: gather enough data. 
All the attributes you mentioned (date, name, check-in title/comment, N of deffects etc) are potentially useful - gather as much as possible.
As soon as you have a big project, a number of developers, many branches, frequent commits and you have started collecting all the data, you a ready to go further.

(2) Ask good questions.
The next question you should ask yourself: what effect are you going to measure, estimate and maybe predict.
Frequency of possible bugs? Tracking inaccurate "committers"? Risky branches? Want to see some groups of users/bugs/commits according to some metrics?

(3) Select the model.
As soon as you have the questions formulated, you should follow the general approach in data science - extract needed features in your data, select appropriate model, train you model and test it, apply it. This is too broad process to discuss it this thread, so please use this site to get right answers.