What Community Contribution Pattern Says about Stability of Software Project?

Abstract

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) community management is an important issue. Contributor churn (joining or leaving a project) causes failure of the majority of software projects. In this paper, we present a framework to characterize stability of the community in software maintenance projects by mining Issue Tracking System (ITS). We identify key stability indicators and propose metrics to measure them. We conduct time series analysis on metrics data to examine the stability of the community. We model community participation patterns and forecast future behavior to help plan and support informed decision making. We present a case study of four years data of Google Chromium Project and investigate the inferential ability of the framework.