Unveiling Elite Developers’ Activities in Open Source Projects
Open source developers, particularly the elite developers who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse portfolio of contributing activities. They not only commit source code, but also exert significant efforts on other communicative, organizational, and supportive activities. However, almost all prior research focuses on specific activities and fails to analyze elite developers’ activities in a comprehensive way. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study with fine-grained event data from 20 large open source projects hosted on GitHub. We investigate elite developers’ contributing activities and their impacts on project outcomes. Our analyses reveal three key findings: (1) elite developers participate in a variety of activities, of which technical contributions (e.g., coding) only account for a small proportion; (2) as the project grows, elite developers tend to put more effort into supportive and communicative activities and less effort into coding; and (3) elite developers’ efforts in non-technical activities are negatively correlated with the project’s outcomes in terms of productivity and quality in general, except for a positive correlation with the bug fix rate (a quality indicator). These results provide an integrated view of elite developers’ activities and can inform an individual’s decision making about effort allocation, which could lead to improved project outcomes. The results also provide implications for supporting these elite developers.
Wed 11 NovDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
17:00 - 17:30 | ProductivityJournal First / Student Research Competition / Paper Presentations / Industry Papers / Tool Demos at Virtual room 2 | ||
17:00 2mTalk | Assisting the Elite-driven Open Source Development through Activity Data Paper Presentations Zhendong Wang University of California, Irvine | ||
17:03 1mTalk | Attention Tracking for Developers Student Research Competition Rozaliya Amirova Innopolis University, Russia DOI | ||
17:05 1mTalk | CRSG: A Serious Game for Teaching Code Review Tool Demos Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print | ||
17:07 1mTalk | Establishing Key Performance Indicators for Measuring Software-Development Processes at a Large Organization Industry Papers Cem Sürücü Volkswagen Financial Services, Germany / University of Magdeburg, Germany, Bianying Song Volkswagen Financial Services, Germany, Jacob Krüger University of Magdeburg, Germany, Gunter Saake University of Magdeburg, Germany, Thomas Leich Harz University of Applied Sciences, Germany DOI | ||
17:09 1mTalk | How to Succeed in the Software Business While Giving Away the Source Code: The AdaCore Experience Journal First Ben Brosgol AdaCore | ||
17:11 1mTalk | The End of the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity Journal First William R. Nichols Carnegie Mellon University/Software Engineering Institute | ||
17:12 2mTalk | Unveiling Elite Developers’ Activities in Open Source Projects Journal First Zhendong Wang University of California, Irvine, Yang Feng Nanjing University, Yi Wang CoCo Labs, USA, James Jones University of California, Irvine, David Redmiles University of California, Irvine | ||
17:14 16mTalk | Conversations on Productivity Paper Presentations Ben Brosgol AdaCore, Kaan Ünlü Bilkent University, Rozaliya Amirova Innopolis University, Russia, Zhendong Wang University of California, Irvine, William R. Nichols Carnegie Mellon University/Software Engineering Institute, M: Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology |