DisTrack: Disengagement Tracking Tool in Open Source Projects
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on a small number of core developers whose departure can stall development or leave critical code unmaintained. Prior work has characterized and labeled inactivity, yet maintainers still lack practical tools to anticipate departures before overall project quality degrades. This paper contributes a forecasting pipeline, an interactive tool built on it, and an initial evaluation with OSS practitioners. First, we develop a model pipeline that reconstructs per-developer daily activity profiles from public GitHub traces, using project-health, socio-technical-network, and knowledge-distribution dimensions feeding them to an LSTM that frames inactivity forecasting as horizon-aware classification, predicting whether a core developer will become inactive within the next k days. Evaluated on 100+ repositories across 45 organizations (226 core developers, ~870,000 developer-days), the pipeline flags up to 75% of true 14-day inactivity-onset windows within a realistic maintainer alert budget. Second, we present DISTRACK, an interactive tool built on this pipeline that delivers model outputs shows at-risk files, project health and simulates the effect of a predicted departure on a project’s collaboration network. Third, we evaluated DISTRACK through structured interviews with OSS practitioners. The project initially question aimed to determine whether developer inactivity could be reliably predicted and our modeling pipeline demonstrated that such predictions are technically feasible. However, the interviews revealed that technical accuracy does not always translate into practical usefulness for all users. Experienced practitioners, particularly long-term core maintainers of small projects, reported limited Perceived Usefulness because they have deep contextual knowledge accumulated over many years, they often already sense when a fellow maintainer is becoming less active. The interviews suggested that the tool’s predictive insights value, if any, lie with other audiences, such as newcomers, future successors, and members of larger distributed communities, who lack the long-term project insight.
This program is tentative and subject to change.
Fri 18 SepDisplayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change
16:00 - 17:30 | Session 28 - Innovation in Action: From Insight to ImpactTool Demonstration and Data Showcase Track / Registered Reports / Visions and Emerging Results Track / Research Papers Track at A53S Chair(s): Joshua A.C. Behler Bowling Green State University Theme: Emerging Results, Tools & Industry Innovation | ||
16:00 10mPaper | Helpful or Harmful? Evaluating LLM-Assisted Vulnerability Patching via a Human Study Registered Reports Giulian Biolo University Of Trento, Michael Tezza University Of Trento, Yuanjun Gong University of Trento, Fabio Massacci University of Trento; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Pre-print | ||
16:10 10mPaper | Understanding Drift in DevOps for Cyber Physical Systems: A Multi-industry Mixed Method Study (Registered Report) Registered Reports Pushpa Priyanka Palesetti Lund Univeristy, Emelie Engstrom Lund University, Emma Söderberg Lund University, Alma Orucevic-Alagic Lund University Pre-print | ||
16:20 20mPaper | CONFIDE: Multimodal Conflict-aware Microservice Extraction via Evidential Deep Learning Research Papers Track Jinmeng Ye Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Jing Li Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Yuanning Cui Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Jiaqi Zhang Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Ming Wang Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics | ||
16:40 20mPaper | T(r)opical Islands: Visualizing & Understanding Socio-Technical Artifacts Research Papers Track Adam Štěpánek Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Marco Raglianti REVEAL @ Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana, Vít Rusňák Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Jan Byška Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University; Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, Barbora Kozlíková Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Michele Lanza REVEAL @ Software Institute, Università della Svizzera italiana Pre-print | ||
17:00 10mShort-paper | DisTrack: Disengagement Tracking Tool in Open Source Projects Tool Demonstration and Data Showcase Track Samuel Walter Utzinger Northern Arizona University, Pedro Oliveira RESHAPE LAB, Northern Arizona University, USA, Fabio Calefato University of Bari, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University, Igor Steinmacher RESHAPE LAB, Northern Arizona University, USA | ||
17:10 10mShort-paper | Can LLMs Chain Bugs into Breaches? Attack Path Discovery in Terraform Visions and Emerging Results Track Lukas Buck Reutlingen University Pre-print | ||