A four stage approach towards speeding GitHub OSS development

Many open source software (OSS) project creators adopt GitHub as their chosen online repository. They seek out others within the global OSS community of developers. Such community developers are then encouraged to add their capabilities, ideas and coding into a creator’s developing OSS project. A structural equation modelling study of three top OSS programming languages deploys GitHub’s operational elements as a four stage directional suite of (1) dependent, (2) intermediaries, and (3) independent elements. It shows a project’s activity levels can be enhanced when additional project contributions are effectively stage-wise pursued. A staged development approach helps creators understand the process of attracting OSS developers into a creator’s GitHub project

What You Know and What You Don\u27t Know: A Discussion of Knowledge Intensity and Support Architectures in Improving Crowdsourcing Creativity

Building on the componential theory of creativity, we studied how the crowdsourcing creativity support architectures and the task knowledge intensity levels affect the crowd’s creativity. Using an online experiment, we found that remixing can trigger the crowd to be more creative than external stimuli and using either architecture triggers the crowd to be more creative overall. Also, the crowd is more creative in solving low-knowledge-intensity tasks than in solving high-knowledge-intensity tasks. Interestingly, regardless of the knowledge intensity levels of tasks, crowdsourcing support architectures have a significant impact on the crowd’s creativity. Therefore, our paper contributes to the crowdsourcing literature on promoting crowd creativity and provides practical implications on solving societal challenges, especially large-scale problems

Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.Comment: Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 201

Big data values deliverance: OSS model

Open source software (OSS) repositories, like GitHub, conjointly build numerous big data projects. GitHub developers and/or its responders extend/enhance a project’s software capabilities. Over time, GitHub’s repositories are mined for new knowledge and capabilities. This study’s values-deliverance staging system data mines, isolates, collates and incorporates relevant GitHub text into values deliverance model constructs. This suggests differential construct effects influence a project’s activities levels. The study suggests OSS big data platforms can be software data mined to isolate and assess the values embedded. This also elucidates pathways where behavioral values deliverance improvements to GitHub can likely be most beneficial

GitHub: Factors Influencing Project Activity Levels

Open source software projects typically extend the capabilities of their software by incorporating code contributions from a diverse cross-section of developers. This GitHub structural path modelling study captures the current top 100 JavaScript projects in operation for at least one year or more. It draws on three theories (information integration, planned behavior, and social translucence) to help frame its comparative path approach, and to show ways to speed the collaborative development of GitHub OSS projects. It shows a project’s activity level increases with: (1) greater responder-group collaborative efforts, (2) increased numbers of major critical project version releases, and (3) the generation of further commits. However, the generation of additional forks negatively impacts overall project activity levels

Why We Engage in FLOSS: Answers from Core Developers

The maintenance and evolution of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects demand the constant attraction of core developers. In this paper, we report the results of a survey with 52 developers, who recently became core contributors of popular GitHub projects. We reveal their motivations to assume a key role in FLOSS projects (e.g., improving the projects because they are also using it), the project characteristics that most helped in their engagement process (e.g., a friendly community), and the barriers faced by the surveyed core developers (e.g., lack of time of the project leaders). We also compare our results with related studies about others kinds of open source contributors (casual, one-time, and newcomers).Comment: Accepted at CHASE 2018: 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (8 pages