Perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations: An interview and survey study

Abstract

With the emergence of social coding platforms, collaboration has become a key and dynamic aspect to the success of software projects. In such platforms, developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration in open‐source software development. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software systems than any developer could produce alone. Several approaches have investigated collaboration challenges, for instance, by proposing or evaluating models and tools to support collaborative work. Despite the undeniable importance of the existing efforts in this direction, there are few works on collaboration from perspectives of developers. In this work, we aim to investigate the perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations, such as motivations, techniques, and tools to support global, productive, and collaborative development. Following an ad hoc literature review, an exploratory interview study with 12 open‐source software developers from GitHub, our novel approach for this problem also relies on an extensive survey with 121 developers to confirm or refute the interview results. We found different collaborative contributions, such as managing change requests. Besides, we observed that most collaborators prefer to collaborate with the core team instead of their peers. We also found that most collaboration happens in software development (60%) and maintenance (47%) tasks. Furthermore, despite personal preferences to work independently, developers still consider collaborating with others in specific task categories, for instance, software development. Finally, developers also expressed the importance of the social coding platforms, such as GitHub, to support maintainers, and contributors in making decisions and developing tasks of the projects. Therefore, these findings may help project leaders optimize the collaborations among developers and reduce entry barriers. Moreover, these findings may support the project collaborators in understanding the collaboration process and engaging others in the project.

Dual analysis for helping developers to find collaborators based on co‐changed files: An empirical study

“…Besides, software development tasks are the most prominent category regarding what participants understand as collaborative contributions to projects, as observed in our prior works. 15,16 Each participant analyzed the contributions of another developer of the same project, as presented in Figure 6. These contributions were the result of one of the two strategies.…”

“…These considerations are of relevance because many opportunities for contributing to the project are linked to coding tasks. 15,16 Thus, they may indicate one less barrier for improving collaboration among developers of the project. Moreover, the acceptance rates of the GitHub surveyed developers are 80% and 65% for Strategy 1 and Strategy 2, respectively.…”

“…As a result, we could observe that developers have a similar interest and are familiar with the co‐change files. These considerations are of relevance because many opportunities for contributing to the project are linked to coding tasks 15,16 . Thus, they may indicate one less barrier for improving collaboration among developers of the project.…”

Editorial: Best papers of the 14th International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP 2020) and 15th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2020)

“…Constantino et al 3 discussed how and why Open‐Source developers collaborate in their paper “Perceptions of Open‐Source Software Developers on Collaborations: An Interview and Survey Study.” By surveying the literature and conducting interviews and a questionnaire, they found that most contributors prefer collaborating with core members and that most collaboration happens in software development and maintenance tasks. Their findings may aid project leaders in optimizing the collaborations among developers and reducing entry barriers.…”

CoopFinder: Finding Collaborators Based on Co–Changed Files

“…The interactive ability of the tool allows developers or maintainers to follow the collaborator's activities to find the most appropriate developer 1 https://github.com/ 2 https://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/ kattiana/coopfinder/welcome.html for collaboration opportunities. Based on previous works [17], [18], we considered that the set of files of interest is strong ties to connect developers of a project. That is, coding tasks may link opportunities for joint contributions to the project.…”