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.
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Using Productive Collaboration Bursts to Analyze Open Source Collaboration Effectiveness
Developers of open-source software projects tend to
collaborate in bursts of activity over a few days at a time, rather
than at an even pace. A project might find its productivity
suffering if bursts of activity occur when a key person with
the right role or right expertise is not available to participate.
Open-source projects could benefit from monitoring the way
they orchestrate attention among key developers, finding ways
to make themselves available to one another when needed. In
commercial software development, Sociotechnical Congruence
(STC) has been used as a measure to assess whether coordination
among developers is sufficient for a given task. However, STC has
not previously been successfully applied to open-source projects,
in which some industrial assumptions do not apply: managementchosen
targets, mandated steady work hours, and top-down task
allocation of inputs and targets. In this work we propose an
operationalization of STC for open-source software development.
We use temporal bursts of activity as a unit of analysis more
suited to the natural rhythms of open-source work, as well as
open source analogues of other component measures needed for
calculating STC. As an illustration, we demonstrate that opensource
development on PyPI projects in GitHub is indeed bursty,
that activities in the bursts have topical coherence, and we apply
our operationalization of STC. We argue that a measure of
socio-technical congruence adapted to open source could provide
projects with a better way of tracking how effectively they are
collaborating when they come together to collaborate.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1302522
- PAR ID:
- 10468293
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE SANER 2020
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-7281-5143-4
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 400 to 410
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Socio-Technical Congruence, Productivity Bursty Collaboration Hidden Markov Model Open-Source GitHub
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- London, ON, Canada
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER48275.2020.9054852
