How does contributors involvement influence open source systems

Abstract

Open source software systems are based on the principle of open collaboration for innovation and production. They highly depend on volunteer developers contributions for their existence and continuity; attracting new volunteer developers is crucial for the OSS community sustainability. However, new developers might be hesitant to join and participate to a project due to many obstacles such as lack of awareness and guidelines in the OSS community and inability for long-term commitment and dedication which might result in a low retention rate. In the OSS community, contributors come from different backgrounds and skill levels, and they have different levels of participation in the system. They can be categorized into core and peripheral based on the frequency of the commits they author. While it is acknowledged that developers have different levels of participation to a software system, little is known about how different degrees of contribution impact the OSS system. In this study, we explore whether core and peripheral developers contributions to the OSS systems vary in terms of type and quality by analyzing a total of 19,580 commits from 38 Apache Java software systems to better understand how different levels of developers involvement within a software system relate to the type and quality of the their contributions.