Paper Info
Title
Social Activities Rival Patch Submission for Prediction of Developer Initiation in OSS Projects
Abstract
Maintaining a productive and collaborative team of developers is essential to Open Source Software (OSS) success, and hinges upon the trust inherent among the team. Whether a project participant is initiated as a developer is a function of both his technical contributions and also his social interactions with other project participants. One芒€™s online social footprint is arguably easier to ascertain and gather than one芒€™s technical contributions e.g., gathering patch submission information requires mining multiple sources with different formats, and then merging the aliases from these sources. In contrast to prior work, where patch submission was found to be an essential ingredient to achieving developer status, here we investigate the extent to which the likelihood of achieving that status can be modeled solely as a social network phenomenon. For 6 different OSS projects we compile and integrate a set of social measures of the communications network among OSS project participants and a set of technical measures, i.e. OSS developers patch submission activities. We use these sets to predict whether a project participant will become a developer. We find that the social network metrics, in particular the amount of two-way communication a person participates in, are more significant predictors of one芒€™s likelihood to becoming a developer. Further, we find that this is true to the extent that other predictors, e.g. patch submission info, need not be included in the models. In addition, we show that future developers are easy to identify with great fidelity when using the first three months of data of their social activities. Moreover, only the first month of their social links are a very useful predictor, coming within 10% of the three month data芒€™s predictions. Finally, we find that it is easier to become a developer earlier in the projects lifecycle than it is later as the project matures. These results should provide insight on the social nature of gaining trust and advancing in status in distributed projects.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ICSM.2013.45
Software Maintenance
Keywords
Field
DocType
public domain software,social networking (online),software maintenance,trusted computing,OSS projects,Oneâs online social footprint,developer initiation,social activities,social activities rival patch submission,social links,social network metrics,social network phenomenon,two-way communication
Fidelity,Trusted Computing,Social network,Computer science,Knowledge management,Compiler,Social nature,Software maintenance,Merge (version control),Social computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-6773
8
0.44
References 
Authors
11
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mohammad Gharehyazie1503.16
Daryl Posnett257819.11
Vladimir Filkov3150375.32