Reviewing Career Paths of the OpenStack Developers

Career perspectives are known to motivate software engineers. However, so far, career perspectives have been mostly studied within traditional software development companies. In our work we take a complementary approach and study career paths of open source developers, focusing on their advancement through the code review hierarchy, from developers to reviewers and further to core reviewers.To gain understanding of code review career paths we conduct an exploratory case study of the OpenStack community. Based on the case study we have publicized anonymized research data and formulated four hypotheses pertaining to career paths of contributors in modern multi-company open source projects. We conjecture that(i) developers and reviewers are separate subpopulations with little movement between them, (ii-a) the turnover of the core reviewers is high and rapid, (ii-b) companies are interested in having core reviewers among their staff, and (iii) being a core reviewer is beneficial for career.Validity of those hypotheses in other multi-company open source projects should be investigated in the follow-up studies.

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