TY - JOUR
T1 - Investigating and projecting population structures in open source software projects
T2 - A case study of projects in GitHub
AU - Onoue, Saya
AU - Hata, Hideaki
AU - Monden, Akito
AU - Matsumoto, Kenichi
N1 - Funding Information:
This work has been supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 26540029 and Program for Advancing Strategic International Networks to Accelerate the Circulation of Talented Researchers: Interdisciplinary Global Networks for Accelerating Theory and Practice in Software Ecosystem
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2016 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.
PY - 2016/5
Y1 - 2016/5
N2 - GitHub is a developers' social networking service that hosts a great number of open source software (OSS) projects. Although some of the hosted projects are growing and have many developers, most projects are organized by a few developers and face difficulties in terms of sustainability. OSS projects depend mainly on volunteer developers, and attracting and retaining these volunteers are major concerns of the project stakeholders. To investigate the population structures of OSS development communities in detail and conduct software analytics to obtain actionable information, we apply a demographic approach. Demography is the scientific study of population and seeks to identify the levels and trends in the size and components of a population. This paper presents a case study, investigating the characteristics of the population structures of OSS projects on GitHub, and shows population projections generated with the well-known cohort component method. We found that there are four types of population structures in OSS development communities in terms of experiences and contributions. In addition, we projected the future population accurately using a cohort component population projection method. This method predicts a population of the next period using a survival rate calculated from past population. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that applied demography to the field of OSS research. Our approach addressing OSS-related problems based on demography will bring new insights, since studying population is novel in OSS research. Understanding current and future structures of OSS projects can help practitioners to monitor a project, gain awareness of what is happening, manage risks, and evaluate past decisions.
AB - GitHub is a developers' social networking service that hosts a great number of open source software (OSS) projects. Although some of the hosted projects are growing and have many developers, most projects are organized by a few developers and face difficulties in terms of sustainability. OSS projects depend mainly on volunteer developers, and attracting and retaining these volunteers are major concerns of the project stakeholders. To investigate the population structures of OSS development communities in detail and conduct software analytics to obtain actionable information, we apply a demographic approach. Demography is the scientific study of population and seeks to identify the levels and trends in the size and components of a population. This paper presents a case study, investigating the characteristics of the population structures of OSS projects on GitHub, and shows population projections generated with the well-known cohort component method. We found that there are four types of population structures in OSS development communities in terms of experiences and contributions. In addition, we projected the future population accurately using a cohort component population projection method. This method predicts a population of the next period using a survival rate calculated from past population. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that applied demography to the field of OSS research. Our approach addressing OSS-related problems based on demography will bring new insights, since studying population is novel in OSS research. Understanding current and future structures of OSS projects can help practitioners to monitor a project, gain awareness of what is happening, manage risks, and evaluate past decisions.
KW - Demography
KW - OSS
KW - Software development communities
KW - Software population pyramids
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U2 - 10.1587/transinf.2015EDP7363
DO - 10.1587/transinf.2015EDP7363
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84970028710
SN - 0916-8532
VL - E99D
SP - 1304
EP - 1315
JO - IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
JF - IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
IS - 5
ER -