An open source software （OSS） ecosystem refers to an OSS development community composed of many software projects and developers contributing to these projects. The projects and developers co-evolve in an ecosystem....An open source software （OSS） ecosystem refers to an OSS development community composed of many software projects and developers contributing to these projects. The projects and developers co-evolve in an ecosystem. To keep healthy evolution of such OSS ecosystems, there is a need of attracting and retaining developers, particularly project leaders and core developers who have major impact on the project and the whole team. Therefore, it is important to figure out the factors that influence developers＇ chance to evolve into project leaders and core developers. To identify such factors, we conducted a case study on the GNOME ecosystem. First, we collected indicators reflecting developers＇ subjective willingness to contribute to the project and the project environment that they stay in. Second, we calculated such indicators based on the GNOME dataset. Then, we fitted logistic regression models by taking as independent variables the resulting indicators after eliminating the most collinear ones, and taking as a dependent variable the future developer role （the core developer or project leader）. The results showed that part of such indicators （e.g., the total number of projects that a developer joined） of subjective willingness and project environment significantly influenced the developers＇ chance to evolve into core developers and project leaders. With different validation methods, our obtained model performs well on predicting developmental core developers, resulting in stable prediction performance （0.770, F-value）.展开更多
Many online platforms providing crowd with opportunities to participate in software development projects have been existed for a while. Meanwhile, many enterprises are using crowd source to collaboratively develop the...Many online platforms providing crowd with opportunities to participate in software development projects have been existed for a while. Meanwhile, many enterprises are using crowd source to collaboratively develop their software via these platforms in recent years. However, some software development projects in these platforms hardly attract users to join. Therefore, these project owners need a way to effectively predict the number of participants in their projects and accordingly well plan their software and project specifications, such as the program language and the size of the documentation, in order to attract more individuals to participant in the projects. Compared with the past prediction models, our proposed model can dynamically add the factors, such as number of participants in the initial stage of the project, within the project life cycle and make the adjustment to the prediction model. The proposed model was also verified by using cross validation method. The results show that: 1) The models with the factor “the number of user participation” is more accurate than the model without it. 2) The factors of crowd dimension are more influential on the prediction accuracy than those of software project and owner dimensions. It is suggested that the project owners not only just consider those factors of the software project dimension in the initial stage of the project life cycle but also those factors of crowd and interaction dimensions in the late stage to attract more participants in their projects.展开更多
基金This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2016YFB0800400, the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2014CB340404, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61572371, 61273216, and 61272111, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation （CPSF） under Grant No. 2015M582272, the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province of China under Grant No. 2016CFB158, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China under Grant No. 2042016kf0033.
文摘An open source software （OSS） ecosystem refers to an OSS development community composed of many software projects and developers contributing to these projects. The projects and developers co-evolve in an ecosystem. To keep healthy evolution of such OSS ecosystems, there is a need of attracting and retaining developers, particularly project leaders and core developers who have major impact on the project and the whole team. Therefore, it is important to figure out the factors that influence developers＇ chance to evolve into project leaders and core developers. To identify such factors, we conducted a case study on the GNOME ecosystem. First, we collected indicators reflecting developers＇ subjective willingness to contribute to the project and the project environment that they stay in. Second, we calculated such indicators based on the GNOME dataset. Then, we fitted logistic regression models by taking as independent variables the resulting indicators after eliminating the most collinear ones, and taking as a dependent variable the future developer role （the core developer or project leader）. The results showed that part of such indicators （e.g., the total number of projects that a developer joined） of subjective willingness and project environment significantly influenced the developers＇ chance to evolve into core developers and project leaders. With different validation methods, our obtained model performs well on predicting developmental core developers, resulting in stable prediction performance （0.770, F-value）.
文摘Many online platforms providing crowd with opportunities to participate in software development projects have been existed for a while. Meanwhile, many enterprises are using crowd source to collaboratively develop their software via these platforms in recent years. However, some software development projects in these platforms hardly attract users to join. Therefore, these project owners need a way to effectively predict the number of participants in their projects and accordingly well plan their software and project specifications, such as the program language and the size of the documentation, in order to attract more individuals to participant in the projects. Compared with the past prediction models, our proposed model can dynamically add the factors, such as number of participants in the initial stage of the project, within the project life cycle and make the adjustment to the prediction model. The proposed model was also verified by using cross validation method. The results show that: 1) The models with the factor “the number of user participation” is more accurate than the model without it. 2) The factors of crowd dimension are more influential on the prediction accuracy than those of software project and owner dimensions. It is suggested that the project owners not only just consider those factors of the software project dimension in the initial stage of the project life cycle but also those factors of crowd and interaction dimensions in the late stage to attract more participants in their projects.
