Understanding the Impressions, Motivations, and Barriers of One Time Code Contributors to FLOSS Projects: A Survey

Successful Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects must attract and retain high-quality talent. Researchers have invested considerable effort in the study of core and peripheral FLOSS developers. To this point, one critical subset of developers that have not been studied are One-Time code Contributors (OTC) – those that have had exactly one patch accepted. To understand why OTCs have not contributed another patch and provide guidance to FLOSS projects on retaining OTCs, this study seeks to understand the impressions, motivations, and barriers experienced by OTCs. We conducted an online survey of OTCs from 23 popular FLOSS projects. Based on the 184 responses received, we observed that OTCs generally have positive impressions of their FLOSS project and are driven by a variety of motivations. Most OTCs primarily made contributions to fix bugs that impeded their work and did not plan on becoming long term contributors. Furthermore, OTCs encounter a number of barriers that prevent them from continuing to contribute to the project. Based on our findings, there are some concrete actions FLOSS projects can take to increase the chances of converting OTCs into long-term contributors.

[1]  Sonali K. Shah.  Motivation, Governance, and the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development , 2006, Manag. Sci..

[2]  Volker Gruhn,et al.  An exploratory study of contribution barriers experienced by newcomers to open source software projects , 2014, CSI-SE 2014.

[3]  Volker Gruhn,et al.  Patterns for tearing down contribution barriers to FLOSS projects , 2013, 2013 IEEE 12th International Conference on Intelligent Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques (SoMeT).

[4]  Brian Fitzgerald,et al.  Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects , 2007 .

[5]  Jing Wang,et al.  Comparative case studies of open source software peer review practices , 2015, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[6]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Identifying the characteristics of vulnerable code changes: an empirical study , 2014, SIGSOFT FSE.

[7]  Tetsuo Tamai,et al.  Understanding the process of participating in open source communities , 2009, 2009 ICSE Workshop on Emerging Trends in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Research and Development.

[8]  James M. Bieman,et al.  The FreeBSD project: a replication case study of open source development , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[9]  Alexander Hars,et al.  Working for free? Motivations of participating in open source projects , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[10]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Peer impressions in open source organizations: A survey , 2014, J. Syst. Softw..

[11]  Anita Sarma,et al.  Which bug should I fix: helping new developers onboard a new project , 2011, CHASE '11.

[12]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review: Insights from Open Source Development and Industrial Practice at Microsoft , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[13]  J. R. Landis,et al.  The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. , 1977, Biometrics.

[14]  Audris Mockus,et al.  Who Will Stay in the FLOSS Community? Modeling Participant’s Initial Behavior , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[15]  J. Fleiss,et al.  The measurement of interrater agreement , 2004 .

[16]  Karim R. Lakhani,et al.  Community, Joining, and Specialization in Open Source Software Innovation: A Case Study , 2003 .

[17]  Michael Gertz,et al.  Mining email social networks , 2006, MSR '06.

[18]  Pankaj Setia,et al.  How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development , 2012, Inf. Syst. Res..

[20]  Wang-Chien Lee,et al.  Analyzing the social ties and structure of contributors in Open Source Software community , 2013, 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2013).

[21]  Kouichi Kishida,et al.  Toward an understanding of the motivation of open source software developers , 2003, 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, 2003. Proceedings..

[22]  Marco Aurélio Gerosa,et al.  More Common Than You Think: An In-depth Study of Casual Contributors , 2016, 2016 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER).

[23]  J. Herbsleb,et al.  Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla , 2002, TSEM.

[24]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[25]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Process Aspects and Social Dynamics of Contemporary Code Review : Insights from Open Source Development as well as Industrial Practice at Microsoft , 2016 .

[26]  Jeffrey C. Carver,et al.  Impact of developer reputation on code review outcomes in OSS projects: an empirical investigation , 2014, ESEM '14.

[27]  D HerbslebJames,et al.  Two case studies of open source software development , 2002 .

[28]  Kevin Crowston,et al.  Defining Open Source Software Project Success , 2003, ICIS.

[29]  Carlos Jensen,et al.  Joining Free/Open Source Software Communities: An Analysis of Newbies' First Interactions on Project Mailing Lists , 2011, 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[30]  Jacob Cohen.  A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales , 1960 .

[31]  Nicolas Ducheneaut,et al.  Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis , 2005, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[32]  Gregorio Robles,et al.  Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study - FLOSS FINAL REPORT , 2002 .

[33]  Marco Aurélio Gerosa,et al.  Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects , 2015, CSCW.