Developer Management in FLOSS Projects - Theoretical Concepts and Empirical Evidence

This dissertation derives new ways and methods on how to integrate and bind developers in Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. It examines how sustainable commitment of new contributors can be identified at an early stage, how developers’ geographic dispersion affects their collaboration productivity, if the presence of reputable developers increases teamwork productivity and if mentoring is an appropriate means to bind developers in FLOSS projects. To address these research questions, the thesis builds on established theories and concepts from organizational and social science such as Person-Job (P-J) and Person-Team (P-T) fit, the social practice view and self-determination theory. The results of the performed empirical evaluations suggest that: (i) the derived criteria for P-J and P-T fit are suitable to identify sustained commitment early on, (ii) developers’ offline relationships determine if their spatial and cultural distance becomes a gain or a burden for their collaboration, (iii) the presence of reputable developers increases productivity in FLOSS projects only marginally, (iv) mentoring is an appropriate means to bind developers in FLOSS projectsDiese Dissertation erarbeitet neue Strategien und Methoden, um Entwickler in Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Projekte zu integrieren und langfristig zu binden. Hierzu untersucht die vorliegende Arbeit wie sich die Eignung neuer Entwickler frühzeitig vorhersehen lässt, was für einen Einfluss geographische Distanzen bei der Zusammenarbeit von FLOSS Entwickler haben, ob durch die Anwesenheit namhafter Entwickler die Teamproduktivität steigt und ob Mentoring hilft Entwickler langfristig an FLOSS Projekte zu binden. Für die Bearbeitung dieser Fragen baut die Arbeit auf etablierten Theorien und Konzepten aus der Organisations- und Sozialforschung auf, wie unter anderem dem Person-Job (P-J) und Person-Team (P-T) Fit, der Theorie der sozialen Praxis und der Selbstbestimmungstheorie. Die Ergebnisse der durchgeführten empirischen Untersuchungen zeigen, dass (i) die abgeleiteten Indikatoren zur Bestimmung des P-J und P-T Fit ein geeignetes Kriterium sind, um das langfristige Engagement von Entwicklern zu prognostizieren, (ii) die offline Beziehungen der Entwickler darüber entscheiden ob räumliche und kulturelle Distanz die Zusammenarbeit behindert oder fördert, (iii) die Anwesenheit namhafter Entwickler nur geringfügig die Teamproduktivität erhöht, (iv) Mentoring ein geeignetes Instrument zur Bindung von Entwicklern im Projekt ist

Managing episodic volunteers in free/libre/open source software communities

We draw on the concept of episodic volunteering (EV) from the general volunteering literature to identify practices for managing EV in free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) communities. Infrequent but ongoing participation is widespread, but the practices that community managers are using to manage EV, and their concerns about EV, have not been previously documented. We conducted a policy Delphi study involving 24 FLOSS community managers from 22 different communities. Our panel identified 16 concerns related to managing EV in FLOSS, which we ranked by prevalence. We also describe 65 practices for managing EV in FLOSS. Almost three-quarters of these practices are used by at least three community managers. We report these practices using a systematic presentation that includes context, relationships between practices, and concerns that they address. These findings provide a coherent framework that can help FLOSS community managers to better manage episodic contributors

A systematic examination of knowledge loss in open source software projects

Context Open Source Software (OSS) development is a knowledge focused activity which relies heavily on contributors who can be volunteers or paid workers and are geographically distributed. While working on OSS projects contributors acquire project related individualistic knowledge and gain experience and skills, which often remains unshared with others and is usually lost once contributors leave a project. All software development organisations face the problem of knowledge loss as employees leave, but this situation is exasperated in OSS projects where most contributors are volunteers with largely unpredictable engagement durations. Contributor turnover is inevitable due to the transient nature of OSS project workforces causing knowledge loss, which threatens the overall sustainability of OSS projects and impacts negatively on software quality and contributor productivity. Objective The objective of this work is to deeply and systematically investigate the phenomenon of knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects as presented in the state-of-the-art literature and to synthesise the information presented on the topic. Furthermore, based on the learning arising from our investigation it is our intention to identify mechanisms to reduce the overall effects of knowledge loss in OSS projects. Methodology We use the snowballing methodology to identify the relevant literature on knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects. This robust methodology for a literature review includes research question, search strategy, inclusion, exclusion, quality criteria, and data synthesis. The search strategy, and inclusion, exclusions and quality criteria are applied as a part of snowballing procedure. Snowballing is considered an efficient and reliable way to conduct a systematic literature review, providing a robust alternative to mechanically searching individual databases for given topics. Result Knowledge sharing in OSS projects is abundant but there is no evidence of a formal strategy or practice to manage knowledge. Due to the dynamic and diverse nature of OSS projects, knowledge management is considered a challenging task and there is a need for a proactive mechanism to share knowledge in the OSS community for knowledge to be reused in the future by the OSS project contributors. From the collection of papers found using snowballing, we consolidated various themes on knowledge loss due to contributor turnover in OSS projects and identified 11 impacts due to knowledge loss in OSS projects, and 10 mitigations to manage with knowledge loss in OSS projects. Conclusion In this paper, we propose future research directions to investigate integration of proactive knowledge retention practices with the existing OSS practices to reduce the current knowledge loss problem. We suggest that there is insufficient attention paid to KM in general in OSS, in particular there would appear to an absence of proactive measures to reduce the potential impact of knowledge loss. We also propose the need for a KM evaluation metric in OSS projects, similar to the ones that evaluate health of online communities, which should help to inform potential consumers of the OSS of the KM status on a project, something that is not existent today

Understanding contributor behaviour within Free/Libre/Open Source Software communities: A socialization perspective

Attracting a large number of new contributors has been seen as a way to ensure the survival, long-term success, and sustainability of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities. However, this appears to be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition, as the well-being of FLOSS communities also relies on members performing behaviours that nurture and protect the community. Despite a large body of research on FLOSS communities, few studies have been undertaken to explore the influence of a participant’s socialization experience on their contribution behaviour. In addition, there has been relatively little research that has adopted a community-level view of FLOSS community participants’ contribution that goes beyond the mere notion of writing lines of code. The purpose of this study is to develop and rigorously test a socialization model that predicts contributor behaviour in the FLOSS community context. Drawing upon theories of socialization and citizenship behaviours from organizational behaviour research, this research develops and tests two separate but related research models. The first model proposes the direct impact of socialization factors on two performance-related dependent variables: task performance and community citizenship behaviours. The second model hypothesizes a mediating effect of two proximal socialization variables, social identification and social integration, between the socialization factors and the dependent variables. An exploratory study involving eleven FLOSS community leaders, managers, and experienced members was first conducted, to investigate the key variables that characterize FLOSS community newcomer socialization experience as well as the various instances of citizenship behaviours that are specific to the FLOSS community context. The analysis of the interview data revealed the existence of six socialization variables: task segregation, task purposefulness, interaction intensity, mentoring, joining structuredness, and supportiveness. Two sets of FLOSS community citizenship behaviours (CCB) were identified drawing on the citizenship behaviour literature. The first set, labelled CCB-I, comprised citizenship behaviours directed towards the benefit of individuals. The second set, CCB-P, included citizenship behaviours directed towards the benefit of the project. The findings were integrated in the two conceptual models. Subsequently, a research instrument was developed, following an extensive purification process that consisted of card sorting and expert review rounds, and a survey pretest. A pilot study assessed responses from 46 FLOSS contributors from two large FLOSS communities. Overall, the scales demonstrated high reliability and showed adequate construct validity. The analysis of the pilot study suggested the existence of a third CCB dimension, named CCB-C, that characterizes citizenship behaviours that are oriented towards the benefit of a project’s community. The main study was based on an online survey involving 327 respondents from twelve large FLOSS communities. Using Partial Least Squares (PLS), the collected data was used to test the two models. The results showed the overall superior predictive capability of the model hypothesizing the mediating effect of both social identification and social integration. Task performance was found to be directly predicted by task purposefulness as well as by interaction intensity and supportiveness through the mediation of social identification. Meanwhile, CCB was found to be impacted by the direct effect of task segregation and task purposefulness, and by interaction intensity and supportiveness through the mediation of both social identification and social integration. The existence of the third CCB dimension, CCB-C, was confirmed

Contribution Barriers to Open Source Projects

Contribution barriers are properties of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects that may prevent newcomers from contributing. Contribution barriers can be seen as forces that oppose the motivations of newcomers. While there is extensive research on the motivation of FLOSS developers, little is known about contribution barriers. However, a steady influx of new developers is connected to the success of a FLOSS project. The first part of this thesis adds two surveys to the existing research that target contribution barriers and motivations of newcomers. The first exploratory survey provides the indications to formulate research hypotheses for the second main survey with 117 responses from newcomers in the two FLOSS projects Mozilla and GNOME. The results lead to an assessment of the importance of the identified contribution barriers and to a new model of the joining process that allows the identification of subgroups of newcomers affected by specific contribution barriers. The second part of the thesis uses the pattern concept to externalize knowledge about techniques lowering contribution barriers. This includes a complete categorization of the existing work on FLOSS patterns and the first empirical evaluation of these FLOSS patterns and their relationships. The thesis contains six FLOSS patterns that lower specific important contribution barriers identified in the surveys. Wikis are web-based systems that allow its users to modify the wiki's contents. They found on wiki principles with which they minimize contribution barriers. The last part of the thesis explores whether a wiki, whose content is usually natural text, can also be used for software development. Such a Wiki Development Environment (WikiDE) must fulfill the requirements of both an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a wiki. The simultaneous compliance of both sets of requirements imposes special challenges. The thesis describes an adapted contribution process supported by an architecture concept that solves these challenges. Two components of a WikiDE are discussed in detail. Each of them helps to lower a contribution barrier. A Proof of Concept (PoC) realization demonstrates the feasibility of the concept

Online Communities of Creation as Collective Action. Access, Use, and Participation in a Digitalized Knowledge Economy

This document presents the research I have undertaken over the last decade. It is both retrospective and prospective in the sense that, although it is obviously focused on my past activities, it also indicates ways for future research. The main topic of my overall research can be summarized as follows: I explore the development of online, open projects, or communities of creation, such as Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS), from an economics point of view. This means that in addition to renewing the answers to Olson's question about the individual participation to collective action (1965), it questions also the why and how companies participate in this process, renewing Arrow's dilemma (1962) on the incentives to produce innovation and the incentive to disseminate this innovation, and the way people organize themselves to transform participation into concrete pieces of knowledge, being software or encyclopedia articles

Personalized First Issue Recommender for Newcomers in Open Source Projects

Many open source projects provide good first issues (GFIs) to attract and retain newcomers. Although several automated GFI recommenders have been proposed, existing recommenders are limited to recommending generic GFIs without considering differences between individual newcomers. However, we observe mismatches between generic GFIs and the diverse background of newcomers, resulting in failed attempts, discouraged onboarding, and delayed issue resolution. To address this problem, we assume that personalized first issues (PFIs) for newcomers could help reduce the mismatches. To justify the assumption, we empirically analyze 37 newcomers and their first issues resolved across multiple projects. We find that the first issues resolved by the same newcomer share similarities in task type, programming language, and project domain. These findings underscore the need for a PFI recommender to improve over state-of-the-art approaches. For that purpose, we identify features that influence newcomers' personalized selection of first issues by analyzing the relationship between possible features of the newcomers and the characteristics of the newcomers' chosen first issues. We find that the expertise preference, OSS experience, activeness, and sentiment of newcomers drive their personalized choice of the first issues. Based on these findings, we propose a Personalized First Issue Recommender (PFIRec), which employs LamdaMART to rank candidate issues for a given newcomer by leveraging the identified influential features. We evaluate PFIRec using a dataset of 68,858 issues from 100 GitHub projects. The evaluation results show that PFIRec outperforms existing first issue recommenders, potentially doubling the probability that the top recommended issue is suitable for a specific newcomer and reducing one-third of a newcomer's unsuccessful attempts to identify suitable first issues, in the median.Comment: The 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2023

Addressing the Intersections of Juvenile Justice Involvement and Youth Homelessness: Principles for Change

A young person's involvement with the justice system can increase their likelihood of later experiencing homelessness for many reasons, including the fact that educational disruptions and juvenile delinquency records can make it harder to obtain employment. Youth experiencing homelessness may also be swept into the juvenile justice system through laws that prohibit simply being in public spaces, such as juvenile curfews, or anti-sitting or sleeping ordinances. Both juvenile justice involvement and youth homelessness have long-term negative consequences. The Principles in Part I of this document provide a roadmap for communities to help young people avoid experiencing juvenile justice system involvement and/or youth homelessness