%0 Journal Article
%T Understanding Contributor to Developer Turnover Patterns in OSS Projects: A Case Study of Apache Projects
%A Aftab Iqbal
%J ISRN Software Engineering
%D 2014
%R 10.1155/2014/535724
%X OSS projects are dynamic in nature. Developers contribute to a project for a certain period of time and later leave the project or join other projects of high interest. Hence, the OSS community always welcomes members who can attain the role of a developer in a project. In this paper, we investigate contributions made by members who have attained the role of a developer. In particular, we study the contributions made by the members in terms of bugs reported, comments on bugs, source-code patch submissions, and their social relation with other members of an OSS community. Further, we study the significance of nondevelopers contribution and investigate if and to what extent they play a role in the long-term survival of an OSS project. Moreover, we investigate the ratio of contributions made by a member before and after attaining the role of a developer. We have outlined 4 research questions in this regard and further discuss our findings based on the research questions by taking into account data from software repositories of 4 different Apache projects. 1. Introduction and Motivation Open source software (OSS) is a good example of global software development. It has gained a lot of attraction from the public and the software engineering community over the past decade. The success of an OSS project is highly dependent on the infrastructure provided by the community to the developers and users in order to collaborate with each other [1]. It is important to understand how the OSS project and the community surrounding it evolve over time. During the project and community evolution, the roles of the members change significantly, depending on how much the member wants to get involved into the community. Unlike a project member in a software company whose role is determined by a project manager and remains unchanged for a long period of time until the member is promoted or leaves, the role in an OSS project is not preassigned and is assumed by a member as he/she interacts with other members. An active and determined member usually becomes a ˇ°core memberˇ± through the following path: a newcomer starts as a ˇ°readerˇ±, reading messages on the mailing lists, going through the wiki pages and other documentation, and so forth, in order to understand how the system works. Later, he starts to discover and report bugs, which does not require any technical knowledge, and becomes a ˇ°bug reporterˇ±. After gaining good understanding of the system and community, he may start fixing small and easy bugs which he identifies himself or are reported by other members of the system,
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.software.engineering/2014/535724/