Paper Info
Title
Developer Turnover in Global, Industrial Open Source Projects: Insights from Applying Survival Analysis.
Abstract
Large open source software projects often have a globally distributed development team. Studies have shown developer turnover has a significant impact on the project success. Frequent developer turnover may lead to loss of productivity due to lacking relevant knowledge and spending extra time learning how projects work. Thus, lots of attention has been paid to which factors are related to developer retention; however, few of them focus on the impact of activities of individual developers. In this paper, we study five open source projects from different organizations and examine whether developer turnover is affected by when they start contributing and what types of contributions they are making. Our study reveals that developers have higher chances to survive in software projects when they 1) start contributing to the project earlier; 2) mainly modify instead of creating files; 3) mainly code instead of dealing with documentations. Our results also shed lights on the potential approaches to improving developer retention.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/ICGSE.2017.11
ICGSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
industrial open source software projects,survival analysis,globally distributed development,developer turnover
Systems engineering,Knowledge management,Distributed development,Distance collaboration,Software,Engineering,Documentation,Open source software,Project success
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2329-6305
978-1-5386-1588-1
11
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.50
31
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bin Lin1110.50
Gregorio Robles2129491.67
Alexander Serebrenik31745150.69