Distribution and Continuity of Developers' Contributions in OSS Projects: A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract-Open Source Software (OSS) is usually developed by geographically-distributed developers in a collaborative manner. Different developers exhibit different behaviors and make diversified contributions to OSS projects. Objective of this paper is to discover individualized characteristics and common patterns of how developers contribute to OSS projects. Continuity is used to delineate how a developer actively contributes to the project over time. Case studies on two OSS projects reveal some significant phenomena on the distribution of developers' contributions relative to absolute time and relative to the milestones (i.e., releases) of OSS projects. We have found that OSS developers' contributions exhibit the "temporal locality", and most of the releases of an OSS project are dominated by the contributions of a limited number of developers.

Unveiling the Dynamics of Extrinsic Motivations in Shaping Future Experts’ Contributions to Developer Q&A Communities

“…Like the badge, gaining reputations makes developers feel competitive to meet their psychological needs for competence. Thus, the reputation motivation encourages developers to contribute continuously [29,35,36]. Accordingly, we suggest the following hypothesis:…”

“…To comprehensively explore the motivational dynamics within the SO community, it is imperative to delineate the incentive mechanisms employed to motivate developers. The SO community utilizes a multifaceted incentive structure, consisting of reputation [8,13], status hierarchy [33,34], and badges [29,35,36].…”