Relating Voluntary Turnover with Job Characteristics, Satisfaction and Work Exhaustion - An Initial Study with Brazilian Developers

High rates of turnover among software developers remain, involving additional costs of hiring and training. Voluntary turnover may be due to workplace issues or personal career decisions, but it might as well relate to Job Characteristics, or even Job Satisfaction and Work Exhaustion. This paper reports on an initial study which quantitatively measured those constructs among 78 software developers working in Brazil who left their jobs voluntarily. For this, we adapted well-known survey instruments, namely the JDS from Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Model, and Maslach et al.'s Burnout Measurement. In average, developers demonstrated low to moderate autonomy (3.75, on a 1-7 scale) and satisfaction (4.08), in addition to moderate exhaustion (4.2) before leaving their jobs, while experiencing high task significance (5.15). Also, testers reported significantly lower job satisfaction than programmers. These results allow us to raise interesting hypotheses to be addressed by future studies.Comment: 4 pages, no figures, 3 tables. Final version for ICSE CHASE 201

From "community" to "commercial" FLOSS: The case of moodle

This is the post-print version of the final published article that is available from the link below. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc.This paper documents the evolution of Moodle, an advanced Content Management System, and its transition from a purely volunteer-based project to one driven by commercial interests and stakeholders. The study of its evolution provides evidence of the sustainability of its process: increasing amounts of provided effort by developers correspond to similarly increasing produced outputs to the Moodle system. It is also evident how this OSS system, apart from achieving the transition to a successful multisite, collaborative and community-based OSS project, depends more on its community than its commercial partners

Engaging without over-powering: A case study of a FLOSS project

This is the post-print version of the published chapter. The original publication is available at the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.The role of Open Source Software (OSS) in the e-learning business has become more and more fundamental in the last 10 years, as long as corporate and government organizations have developed their educational and training programs based on OSS out-of-the-box tools. This paper qualitatively documents the decision of the largest UK e-learning provider, the Open University, to adopt the Moodle e-learning system, and how it has been successfully deployed in its site after a multi-million investment. A further quantitative study also provides evidence of how a commercial stakeholder has been engaged with, and produced outputs for, the Moodle community. Lessons learned from this experience by the stakeholders include the crucial factors of contributing to the OSS community, and adapting to an evolving technology. It also becomes evident how commercial partners helped this OSS system to achieve the transition from an “average” OSS system to a successful multi-site, collaborative and community-based OSS project

The Impact of Person-Organization Fit and Psychological Ownership on Turnover in Open Source Software Projects

Open source software (OSS) projects represent an alternate form of software production by relying primarily on voluntary contributions. Despite the immense success of several mainstream OSS projects such as Mozilla, Linux, and Apache, a vast majority of such projects fail to sustain their development due to high levels of developer turnover. While existing research in the area has offered a rich foundation, we know little about how developers’ perceptions of fit with the project environment may be moderated by the sense of ownership they have toward the project and how it may impact their turnover intentions. Using survey data from 574 GitHub developers, we tested a model to examine the impact of Person-Organization fit and psychological ownership on developers’ turnover intentions. Our results suggest that two relevant dimensions of fit, namely, value and demands-abilities fit, negatively impact turnover intentions and that their sense of ownership moderates these effects

The Impact of Person-Organization Fit on Turnover in Open Source Software Projects

Participant turnover in open source software development is a critical problem. Using Schneider’s (1987) Attraction Selection and Attrition Framework and the notion of Person- Organization fit, we hypothesize about the relationship between a participant\u27s fit with an open source project and turnover. Specifically we predict that value fit, needs-supplies fit and demandsabilities fit between a participant and a particular project will have a negative association with participant turnover and that the role of the participant in the project acts a moderator. An empirical study is designed to examine the hypotheses using a combination of survey and archival data. Since for-profit companies are increasingly leveraging open source software development, implications of our findings will be useful for project managers seeking to retain talented contributors in the absence of financial compensation

Evolutionary success of open source software: an investigation into exogenous drivers

The “success” of a Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) project has often been evaluated through the number of commits made to its configuration management system, number of developers and number of users. Based on SourceForge, most studies have concluded that the vast majority of projects are failures. This paper argues that the relative success of a FLOSS project can depend also on the chosen forge and distribution. Given a random sample of 50 projects contained within a popular FLOSS forge (Debian, which is the basis of the successful Debian distribution), we compare these with a similar sample from SourceForge, using product and process metrics, such as size achieved and number of developers involved. The results show firstly that, depending on the forge of FLOSS projects, researchers can draw different conclusions regarding what constitutes a successful FLOSS project. Secondly, the projects included in the Debian distribution benefit, on average, from more evolutionary activity and more developers than the comparable projects on SourceForge. Finally, the Debian projects start to benefit from more activity and more developers from the point at which they join this distribution

Adapting the “Staged Model for Software Evolution” to FLOSS

Research into traditional software evolution has been tackled from two broad perspectives: that focused on the how, which looks at the processes, methods and techniques to implement and evolve software; and that focused on the what/why perspective, aiming at achieving an understanding of the drivers and general characteristics of the software evolution phenomenon. The two perspectives are related in various ways: the study of the what/why is for instance essential to achieve an appropriate management of software engineering activities, and to guide innovation in processes, methods and tools, that is, the how. The output of the what/why studies is exemplified by empirical hypotheses, such as the staged model of software evolution,. This paper focuses on the commonalities and differences between the evolution and patterns in the lifecycles of traditional commercial systems and free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) systems. The existing staged model for software evolution is therefore revised for its applicability on FLOSS systems

‘Computing’ Requirements in Open Source Software Projects

Due to high dissimilarity with traditional software development, Requirements Engineering (RE) in Open Source Software (OSS) remains poorly understood, despite the visible success of many OSS projects. In this study, we approach OSS RE as a sociotechnical and distributed cognitive activity where multiple actors deploy heterogeneous artifacts to ‘compute’ requirements as to reach a collectively-held understanding of what the software is going to do. We conduct a case study of a popular OSS project, Rubinius (a Ruby programming language runtime environment). Specifically, we investigate the ways in which this project exhibits distribution of cognitive efforts along social, structural, and temporal dimensions and how its requirements computation takes place accordingly. In particular, we seek to generalize to a theoretical framework that explains how three temporally-ordered processes of distributed cognition in OSS projects, denoted excavation, instantiation, and testing-in-the-wild, tie together to form a powerful distributed computational structure to manage requirements