What make long term contributors: Willingness and opportunity in OSS community

—To survive and succeed, software projects need to attract and retain contributors. We model the individual’s chances to become a valuable contributor through her capacity, willingness, and the opportunity to contribute at the time of joining. Using issue tracking data of Mozilla and Gnome, we find that the probability for a new joiner to become a Long Term Contributor (LTC) is associated with her willingness and environment. Specifically, during their first month, future LTCs tend to be more active and show more community-oriented attitude than other joiners. Joiners who start by commenting on instead of reporting an issue or ones who succeed to get at least one reported issue to be fixed, more than double their odds of becoming an LTC. The micro-climate with a productive and clustered peer group increases the odds. On the contrary, the macro-climate with high project popularity and the micro-climate with low attention from peers reduce the odds. This implies that the interact...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Minghui Zhou, Audris Mockus
• Keywords: Community Architecture, ICSE 2012, Ltcs, Micro Climate, Software Engineering