Title
Activity-Based Analysis of Open Source Software Contributors: Roles and Dynamics.
Abstract
Contributors to open source software (OSS) communities assume diverse roles to take different responsibilities. One major limitation of the current OSS tools and platforms is that they provide a uniform user interface regardless of the activities performed by the various types of contributors. This paper serves as a non-trivial first step towards resolving this challenge by demonstrating a methodology and establishing knowledge to understand how the contributors' roles and their dynamics, reflected in the activities contributors perform, are exhibited in OSS communities. Based on an analysis of user action data from 29 GitHub projects, we extracted six activities that distinguished four Active roles and five Supporting roles of OSS contributors, as well as patterns in role changes. Through the lens of the Activity Theory, these findings provided rich design guidelines for OSS tools to support diverse contributor roles.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/CHASE.2019.00011
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
activity-based analysis, contributor roles, open source community, open source software
Data science,Systems engineering,Computer science,Through-the-lens metering,User interface,Open source software
Journal
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
abs/1903.05277
2574-1780
978-1-7281-2240-3
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
15
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jinghui Cheng112315.32
Jin Guo212311.14