TY - GEN
T1 - How long and how much
T2 - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
AU - Silva, Jefferson O.
AU - Wiese, Igor
AU - German, Daniel
AU - Steinmacher, Igor
AU - Gerosa, Marco A.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/11/2
Y1 - 2017/11/2
N2 - Open Source Software (OSS) communities depend on continually recruiting new contributors. Some communities promote initiatives such as Summers of Code to foster contribution, but little is known about how successful these initiatives are. As a case study, we chose Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a three-month internship promoting software development by students in several OSS projects. We quantitatively investigated different aspects of students' contribution, including number of commits, code churn, and contribution date intervals. We found that 82% of the studied OSS projects merged at least one commit in codebase. When only newcomers are considered, ∼54% of OSS projects merged at least one commit. We also found that ∼23% of newcomers contributed to GSoC projects before knowing they would be accepted. Additionally, we found that the amount of commits and code of students with experience in the GSoC projects are strongly correlated with how much code they produced and how long they remained during and after GSoC. OSS communities can take advantage of our results to balance the trade-offs involved in entering CCEs, to set the communities' expectations about how much contribution they can expect to achieve, and for how long students will probably engage.
AB - Open Source Software (OSS) communities depend on continually recruiting new contributors. Some communities promote initiatives such as Summers of Code to foster contribution, but little is known about how successful these initiatives are. As a case study, we chose Google Summer of Code (GSoC), which is a three-month internship promoting software development by students in several OSS projects. We quantitatively investigated different aspects of students' contribution, including number of commits, code churn, and contribution date intervals. We found that 82% of the studied OSS projects merged at least one commit in codebase. When only newcomers are considered, ∼54% of OSS projects merged at least one commit. We also found that ∼23% of newcomers contributed to GSoC projects before knowing they would be accepted. Additionally, we found that the amount of commits and code of students with experience in the GSoC projects are strongly correlated with how much code they produced and how long they remained during and after GSoC. OSS communities can take advantage of our results to balance the trade-offs involved in entering CCEs, to set the communities' expectations about how much contribution they can expect to achieve, and for how long students will probably engage.
KW - Community code engagement
KW - Google Summer of Code
KW - Mining software repositories
KW - Newcomers
KW - Open source software
KW - Sustainability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85040559958&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85040559958&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICSME.2017.81
DO - 10.1109/ICSME.2017.81
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85040559958
T3 - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
SP - 69
EP - 79
BT - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2017
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 19 September 2017 through 22 September 2017
ER -