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Wed 11 Nov 2020 17:12 - 17:14 at Virtual room 2 - Productivity

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 Nov

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17:00 - 17:30
17:00
2m
Talk
Assisting the Elite-driven Open Source Development through Activity Data
Paper Presentations
Zhendong Wang University of California, Irvine
17:03
1m
Talk
Attention Tracking for Developers
Student Research Competition
Rozaliya Amirova Innopolis University, Russia
DOI
17:05
1m
Talk
CRSG: A Serious Game for Teaching Code Review
Tool Demos
Kaan Ünlü Bilkent University, Barış Ardıç Bilkent University, Turkey, Eray Tüzün Bilkent University
Link to publication DOI Authorizer link Pre-print
17:07
1m
Talk
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
1m
Talk
How to Succeed in the Software Business While Giving Away the Source Code: The AdaCore Experience
Journal First
Ben Brosgol AdaCore
17:11
1m
Talk
The End of the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
Journal First
William R. Nichols Carnegie Mellon University/Software Engineering Institute
17:12
2m
Talk
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
16m
Talk
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