Assisting the elite-driven open source development through activity data

Abstract

Elite developers, who own the administrative privileges for a project, maintain a diverse profile of contributing activities, and drive the development of open source software (OSS). To advance our understanding and further support the OSS community, I present a fresh approach to investigate developers' public activities from the fine-grained event data provided by GitHub. Further, I develop this approach into an analysis framework for collecting, modeling, and analyzing elite developers' online contributing activities. Employing this framework, I have conducted empirical studies on various OSS projects and ecosystems to characterize elite developers' full-spectrum activities and their dynamics, and also unveil relationships between their effort allocation and projects' technical outcomes. Finally, I propose to design and implement a toolset based on this framework and my results to date, which supports individual developers' decision-making and assists their routine workflows with automation.