UNDERSTANDING PARTICIPATION BEHAVIOR AND STATUS ATTAINMENT OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS – A LATENT CLASS GROWTH MODELING APPROACH

The success of open source software (OSS) projects heavily depends on voluntary participation by a large number of developers. Developers new to an OSS community must participate by engaging in community interactions before they are qualified by the community as core developers. This exploratory study examines new peripheral developers’ temporal participation behavior and its impacts on the time taken to attain core developer status. Using the novel latent class growth modeling approach on 133 peripheral developers across 40 OSS projects, we found that these peripheral developers differed in the initial levels and growth trajectories of participation, and distinct classes of participation behavior were identified. We also found that different classes of developers differ in their time taken to attain core developer status. Implications to research and practice are discussed

Following the Sun: Temporal Dispersion and Performance in Open Source Software Project Teams

Dispersion in working teams has been addressed by extant research mostly in terms of the physical distance that separates team members. Recently, the focus has shifted toward an examination of a newer construct –temporal dispersion (TD). The study of TD so far has been constrained mostly to conceptual work. This study furthers the understanding of TD through an empirical investigation of its relationship with open source software (OSS) team performance. In this paper, hypotheses are developed based on coordination theory, and analyses are performed using data collected from multiple archival sources comprising 100 OSS development teams. Results indicate that TD positively affects development speed and quality and that software complexity moderates the relation between TD and software quality. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. *Both authors contributed equally to the paper