Interpersonal Trust in OSS: Exploring Dimensions of Trust in GitHub Pull Requests

Abstract

Interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in facilitating collaborative tasks, such as software development. While previous research recognizes the significance of trust in an organizational setting, there is a lack of understanding in how trust is exhibited in OSS distributed teams, where there is an absence of direct, in-person communications. To foster trust and collaboration in OSS teams, we need to understand what trust is and how it is exhibited in written developer communications (e.g., pull requests, chats). In this paper, we first investigate various dimensions of trust to identify the ways trusting behavior can be observed in OSS. Next, we sample a set of 100 GitHub pull requests from Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects, to analyze and demonstrate how each dimension of trust can be exhibited. Our findings provide preliminary insights into cues that might be helpful to automatically assess team dynamics and establish interpersonal trust in OSS teams, leading to successful and sustainable OSS.