Elite Developers' Activities at Open Source Ecosystem Level

Abstract

OSS ecosystems promote code reuse, and knowledge sharing across projects within them. An ecosystem's developers often develop similar activity patterns which might impact project outcomes in an ecosystem-specific way. Since elite developers play critical roles in most OSS projects, investigating their behaviors at the ecosystem level becomes urgent. Thus, we aim to investigate elite developers' activities and their relationships with project outcomes (productivity and quality). We design an large scale empirical study which characterizes elite developers' activity profiles and identifies the relationships between their effort allocations and project outcomes across five ecosystems. Our current results and findings reveal that elite developers in each ecosystem do behave in ecosystem-specific ways. Further, we find that the elites' effort allocations on different activity categories are potentially correlated with project outcomes.