Distribution and Continuity of Developers' Contributions in OSS Projects: A Case Study
نویسندگان
چکیده
Open Source Software (OSS) is usually developed by geographically-distributed developers in a collaborative manner. Different developers exhibit different behaviors and make diversified contributions to OSS projects. Objective of this paper is to discover individualized characteristics and common patterns of how developers contribute to OSS projects. Continuity is used to delineate how a developer actively contributes to the project over time. Case studies on two OSS projects reveal some significant phenomena on the distribution of developers’ contributions relative to absolute time and relative to the milestones (i.e., releases) of OSS projects. We have found that OSS developers’ contributions exhibit the “temporal locality”, and most of the releases of an OSS project are dominated by the contributions of a limited number of developers. Keywords– Open Source Software; social development; developers’ contributions; continuity; temporal distribution
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