Will you come back to contribute? Investigating the inactivity of OSS core developers in GitHub
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 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
15:45 - 17:15 | Software ecosystemsSEET - Software Engineering Education and Training / Technical Track / DEMO - Demonstrations / Journal-First Papers / SEIP - Software Engineering in Practice / SEIS - Software Engineering in Society at Meeting Room 110 Chair(s): Sebastian Baltes SAP SE & University of Adelaide | ||
15:45 7mTalk | 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 7mVision 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 15mTalk | 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 15mPaper | 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 15mTalk | 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 15mTalk | 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 7mTalk | 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 7mTalk | 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 |