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9/27/2017  |   4:00 PM - 4:45 PM   |  

How Does Contributors’ Involvement Influence Open Source Systems

Open source software systems are based on the principle of open collaboration for innovation and production. They highly depend on volunteer developers contributions for their existence and continuity; attracting new volunteer developers is crucial for the OSS community sustainability. However, new developers might be hesitate to join and participate to a project due to many obstacles such as lack of awareness and guidelines in the OSS community and inability for long-term commitment and dedication which might result in a low retention rate. In the OSS community, contributors come from different backgrounds and skill levels, and they have different levels of participation in the system. They can be categorized into core and peripheral based on the frequency of the commits they author. While it is acknowledged that developers have different levels of participation to a software system, little is known about how different degrees of contribution impact the OSS system. In this study, we explore whether core and peripheral developers contributions to OSS systems vary in terms of type and quality by analyzing a total of 19,580 commits from 38 Apache Java software systems to better understand how different levels of developers involvement within a software system relate to the type and quality of the their contribution. For each system, we categorized the developers into core and peripheral based on their number of commits using K-means clustering and analyzed each commit to check if it changed LOC, increased LOC, changed TD, or increased TD. Then we compared core and peripheral developers contribution with regards to LOC as an indicator for size and type of contribution and technical debt as a measurement for quality. We applied Fisher's exact test of independence, which is a statistical test used to check whether proportions for one nominal variable are different among values of the other nominal variable, to measure the significant difference. Our results show that in 65.79 % of our subject systems, there is no significant difference between core and peripheral developers’ contribution in terms of the number of commits that change LOC, and in 73.68% of systems no differences was found in the number of commits that increase LOC between the two groups. Additionally, 65.79% of the subject systems show no difference in the number of commits that change technical debt, and in 78.95% of the systems core and peripheral developers increase technical debt similarly. Our findings are encouraging and motivator for new developers to join and contribute to the open source community since the results show no difference in the type and quality of core and peripheral developers contributions.

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Pooyan Behnamghader (Author,Co-Author), Center for Systems and Software Engineering, University of Southern California, pbehnamg@usc.edu;
Pooyan is a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He works in the Center for Systems and Software Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Barry Boehm.

Kamonphop Srisopha (Co-Author), University of Southern California, srisopha@usc.edu;
Kamonphop is currently a Master’s student in software engineering at University of Southern California. Prior to enrolling at University of Southern California, he received his B.S. in computer science from University of Virginia. He is currently working as a research assistant at the center for systems for software engineering at University of Southern California. He is aiming to pursue a Ph.D with particular interest in software engineering, software quality and web development.

Barry Boehm (Co-Author), USC, boehm@usc.edu;
Dr. Barry Boehm is the TRW Professor in the USC Computer Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Astronautics Departments. He is also the Director of Research of the DoD-Stevens-USC Systems Engineering Research Center, and the founding Director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering. He was director of DARPA-ISTO 1989-92, at TRW 1973-89, at Rand Corporation 1959-73, and at General Dynamics 1955-59. His contributions include the COCOMO family of cost models and the Spiral family of process models. He is a Fellow of the primary professional societies in computing (ACM), aerospace (AIAA), electronics (IEEE), and systems engineering (INCOSE), and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Reem Alfayez (Primary Presenter,Author), Center for Systems and Software Engineering, University of Southern California, alfayez@usc.edu;
Reem is a second year Ph.D. student in the Center for Systems and Software Engineering at University of Southern California (USC). She holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from USC and a B.S in Information Technology from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia