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ICSE 2023
Sun 14 - Sat 20 May 2023 Melbourne, Australia
Fri 19 May 2023 17:07 - 17:15 at Meeting Room 110 - Software ecosystems Chair(s): Sebastian Baltes

Several Open-Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers’ inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feedback about the identified breaks and transitions. Our results show that our method was effective for identifying developers’ breaks. About 94% of the surveyed core developers agreed with our state model of inactivity; 71% and 79% of them acknowledged their breaks and state transition, respectively. We also show that all core developers take breaks (at least once) and about a half of them (~45%) have completely disengaged from a project for at least one year. We also analyzed the probability of transitions to/from inactivity and found that developers who pause their activity have a ~35 to ~55% chance to return to an active state; yet, if the break lasts for a year or longer, then the probability of resuming activities drops to ~21–26%, with a ~54% chance of complete disengagement. These results may support the creation of policies and mechanisms to make OSS community managers aware of breaks and potential project abandonment.

Fri 19 May

Displayed time zone: Hobart change

15:45 - 17:15
15:45
7m
Talk
Upstream Bug Management in Linux Distributions - An Empirical Study of Debian and Fedora Practices
Journal-First Papers
Jiahuei Lin Queen’s University Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL), Canada, Haoxiang Zhang Centre for Software Excellence at Huawei Canada, Bram Adams Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Ahmed E. Hassan Queen’s University
15:52
7m
Vision and Emerging Results
Treat societally impactful scientific insights as open-source software artifacts
SEIS - Software Engineering in Society
Cynthia C. S. Liem Delft University of Technology, Andrew M. Demetriou Delft University of Technology
Pre-print
16:00
15m
Talk
Rules of Engagement: Why and How Companies Participate in OSS
Technical Track
Mariam Guizani Oregon State University, Aileen Abril Castro-Guzman Oregon State University, Anita Sarma Oregon State University, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University
Pre-print
16:15
15m
Paper
An Empirical Study on Software Bill of Materials: Where We Stand and the Road Ahead
Technical Track
Boming Xia CSIRO's Data61 & University of New South Wales, Tingting Bi Data61, CSIRO, Zhenchang Xing , Qinghua Lu CSIRO’s Data61, Liming Zhu CSIRO’s Data61
Pre-print
16:30
15m
Talk
Open Source Software Onboarding as a University Course: An Experience Report
SEET - Software Engineering Education and Training
Hao He Peking University, Minghui Zhou Peking University, Qingye Wang Peking University, China, Jingyue Li Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Pre-print
16:45
15m
Talk
An Empirical Study of License Conflict in Free and Open Source Software
SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice
Xing Cui Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Jingzheng Wu Institute of Software, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yanjun Wu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xu Wang Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianyue Luo , Sheng Qu Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiang Ling Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mutian Yang
17:00
7m
Talk
LicenseRec: Knowledge based Open Source License Recommendation for OSS Projects
DEMO - Demonstrations
Weiwei Xu Peking University, Xin Wu Peking University, Runzhi He Peking University, Minghui Zhou Peking University
Pre-print
17:07
7m
Talk
Will you come back to contribute? Investigating the inactivity of OSS core developers in GitHub
Journal-First Papers
Fabio Calefato University of Bari, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, Giuseppe Iaffaldano University of Bari, Filippo Lanubile University of Bari, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University
Link to publication DOI Pre-print