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Recent work on open source sustainability shows that successful trajectories of projects in the Apache Software Foundation Incubator (ASFI) can be predicted early on, using a set of socio-technical measures. Because OSS projects are socio-technical systems centered around code artifacts,we hypothesize that sustainable projects may exhibit different code and process patterns than unsustainable ones, and that those patterns can grow more apparent as projects evolve over time. Here we studied the code and coding processes of over 200 ASFI projects, and found that ASFI graduated projects have different patterns of code quality and complexity than retired ones. Likewise for the coding processes – e.g., feature commits or bug-fixing commits are correlated with project graduation success. We find that minor contributors and major contributors (who contribute <5%, respectively >=95% commits) associate with graduation outcomes, implying that having also developers who contribute fewer commits are important for a project’s success. This study provides evidence that OSS projects, especially nascent ones, can benefit from introspection and instrumentation using multidimensional modeling of the whole system, including code, processes, and code quality measures, and how they are interconnected over time. 

This dataset contains 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects, which contain a governance file in the root directory of the project. It also contains commits, issues, and comments on each project.</p> 

Open-source Software (OSS) has become a valuable resource in both industry and academia over the last few decades. Despite the innovative structures they develop to support the projects, OSS projects and their communities have complex needs and face risks such as getting abandoned. To manage the internal social dynamics and community evolution, OSS developer communities have started relying on written governance documents that assign roles and responsibilities to different community actors. To facilitate the study of the impact and effectiveness of formal governance documents on OSS projects and communities, we present a longitudinal dataset of 710 GitHub-hosted OSS projects with GOVERNANCE.MD governance files. This dataset includes all commits made to the repository, all issues and comments created on GitHub, and all revisions made to the governance file. We hope its availability will foster more research interest in studying how OSS communities govern their projects and the impact of governance files on communities. 

Sustainable Open Source Software (OSS) forms much of the fabric of our digital society, especially successful and sustainable ones. But many OSS projects do not become sustainable, resulting in abandonment and even risks for the world's digital infrastructure. Prior work has looked at the reasons for this mainly from two very different perspectives. In software engineering, the focus has been on understanding success and sustainability from the socio-technical perspective: the OSS programmers' day-to-day activities and the artifacts they create. In institutional analysis, on the other hand, emphasis has been on institutional designs (e.g., policies, rules, and norms) that structure project governance. Even though each is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of OSS projects, the connection and interaction between the two approaches have been barely explored. In this paper, we make the first effort toward understanding OSS project sustainability using a dual-view analysis, by combining institutional analysis with socio-technical systems analysis. In particular, we (i) use linguistic approaches to extract institutional rules and norms from OSS contributors' communications to represent the evolution of their governance systems, and (ii) construct socio-technical networks based on longitudinal collaboration records to represent each project's organizational structure. We combined the two methods and applied them to a dataset of developer digital traces from 253 nascent OSS projects within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator. We find that the socio-technical and institutional features relate to each other, and provide complimentary views into the progress of the ASF's OSS projects. Refining these combined analyses can help provide a more precise understanding of the synchronization between the evolution of institutional governance and organizational structure. 

In Open Source Software (OSS) projects, pre-built tools dominate DevOps-oriented pipelines. In practice, a multitude of configuration management, cloud-based continuous integration, and automated deployment tools exist, and often more than one for each task. Tools are adopted (and given up) by OSS projects regularly. Prior work has shown that some tool adoptions are preceded by discussions, and that tool adoptions can result in benefits to the project. But important questions remain: how do teams decide to adopt a tool? What is discussed before the adoption and for how long? And, what team characteristics are determinant of the adoption? In this paper, we employ a large-scale empirical study in order to characterize the team discussions and to discern the teamlevel determinants of tool adoption into OSS projects' development pipelines. Guided by theories of team and individual motivations and dynamics, we perform exploratory data analyses, do deep-dive case studies, and develop regression models to learn the determinants of adoption and discussion length, and the direction of their effect on the adoption. From data of commit and comment traces of large-scale GitHub projects, our models find that prior exposure to a tool and member involvement are positively associated with the tool adoption, while longer discussions and the number of newer team members associate negatively. These results can provide guidance beyond the technical appropriateness for the timeliness of tool adoptions in diverse programmer teams. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/lkyin/tool_adoptions.