Developer Initiation and Social Interactions in OSS: A Case Study of the Apache Software Foundation

Abstract

Maintaining a productive and collaborative team of developers is essential to Open Source Software (OSS) success, and hinges upon the trust inherent among the team. Whether a project participant is initiated as a committer is a function of both his technical contributions and also his social interactions with other project participants. One's online social footprint is arguably easier to ascertain and gather than one's technical contributions. We investigate the extent to which the likelihood of achieving that status can be modeled solely as a social network phenomenon. For 6 different projects we compile and integrate a set of social measures of the communications network among project participants and a set of technical measures. We use these sets to predict whether a project participant will become a committer, and to characterize their socialization patterns around the time of becoming committer. We find that the social network metrics are more significant predictors of one's likelihood to becoming a committer. Further, we find that this is true to the extent that other predictors need not be included in the models. In addition, we show that future committers are easy to identify when using the first three months of data of their social activities. Interestingly, we find that on average, for each project, one's level of socialization ramps up before the time of becoming a committer. After obtaining committer status, their social behavior is more individualized, falling into few distinct modes of behavior. Finally, we find that it is easier to become a developer earlier in the projects life cycle than it is later as the project matures. These results should provide insight on the social nature of gaining trust and advancing in status in distributed projects.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2014
Accession Number
AD1000240

Entities

People

  • Bogdan Vasilescu
  • Daryl Posnett
  • Mohammad Gharehyazie
  • Vladimir Filkov

Organizations

  • University of California

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Case Studies
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Control Systems
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineering
  • Human Behavior
  • Maximum Likelihood Estimation
  • Models
  • Motivation
  • Network Science
  • Operating Systems
  • Probability
  • Reliability
  • Social Networks
  • Software Development
  • Training

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Organizational Psychology.
  • Systems Analysis and Design