What Make Long Term Contributors:Willingness and Opportunity in OSS Community.

Saved in:

Bibliographic Details
Title:	What Make Long Term Contributors:Willingness and Opportunity in OSS Community.
Authors:	Minghui Zhou¹ zhmh@pku.edu.cn, Mockus, Audris² audris@avaya.com
Source:	ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering. Feb2012, p518-528. 11p.
Subjects:	Execution traces (Computer program testing), Computer software testing, Mozilla Firefox (Computer software), Computer software, Open source software
Abstract:	To survive and succeed, software projects need to attract and retain contributors. We model the individual's chances to become a valuable contributor through her capacity, willingness, and the opportunity to contribute at the time of joining. Using issue tracking data of Mozilla and Gnome, we find that the probability for a new joiner to become a Long Term Contributor (LTC) is associated with her willingness and environment. Specifically, during their first month, future LTCs tend to be more active and show more community-oriented attitude than other joiners. Joiners who start by commenting on instead of reporting an issue or ones who succeed to get at least one reported issue to be fixed, more than double their odds of becoming an LTC. The micro-climate with a productive and clustered peer group increases the odds. On the contrary, the macro-climate with high project popularity and the micro-climate with low attention from peers reduce the odds. This implies that the interaction between individual's attitude and project's climate are associated with the odds that an individual would become a valuable contributor or disengage from the project. Our findings may provide a basis for empirical approaches to design a better community architecture and to improve the experience of contributors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
	Copyright of ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering is the property of Association for Computing Machinery and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Database:	Engineering Source

Description
Abstract:	To survive and succeed, software projects need to attract and retain contributors. We model the individual's chances to become a valuable contributor through her capacity, willingness, and the opportunity to contribute at the time of joining. Using issue tracking data of Mozilla and Gnome, we find that the probability for a new joiner to become a Long Term Contributor (LTC) is associated with her willingness and environment. Specifically, during their first month, future LTCs tend to be more active and show more community-oriented attitude than other joiners. Joiners who start by commenting on instead of reporting an issue or ones who succeed to get at least one reported issue to be fixed, more than double their odds of becoming an LTC. The micro-climate with a productive and clustered peer group increases the odds. On the contrary, the macro-climate with high project popularity and the micro-climate with low attention from peers reduce the odds. This implies that the interaction between individual's attitude and project's climate are associated with the odds that an individual would become a valuable contributor or disengage from the project. Our findings may provide a basis for empirical approaches to design a better community architecture and to improve the experience of contributors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]