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Cited by 141Open Source Software InnovationsSoftware Engineering Techniques and PracticesSoftware Engineering Research

Who Will Stay in the FLOSS Community? Modeling Participant’s Initial Behavior

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Zhou, Minghui, Mockus, Audris·2015·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
DOI 10.1109/tse.2014.2349496
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Abstract

Motivation: To survive and succeed, FLOSS projects need contributors able to accomplish critical project tasks. However, such tasks require extensive project experience of long term contributors (LTCs). Aim: We measure, understand, and predict how the newcomers' involvement and environment in the issue tracking system (ITS) affect their odds of becoming an LTC. Method: ITS data of Mozilla and Gnome, literature, interviews, and online documents were used to design measures of involvement and environment. A logistic regression model was used to explain and predict contributor's odds of becoming an LTC. We also reproduced the results on new data provided by Mozilla. Results: We constructed nine measures of involvement and environment based on events recorded in an ITS. Macro-climate is the overall project environment while micro-climate is person-specific and varies among the participants. Newcomers who are able to get at least one issue reported in the first month to be fixed, doubled their odds of becoming an LTC. The macro-climate with high project popularity and the micro-climate with low attention from peers reduced the odds. The precision of LTC prediction was 38 times higher than for a random predictor. We were able to reproduce the results with new Mozilla data without losing the significance or predictive power of the previously published model. We encountered unexpected changes in some attributes and suggest ways to make analysis of ITS data more reproducible. Conclusions: The findings suggest the importance of initial behaviors and experiences of new participants and outline empirically-based approaches to help the communities with the recruitment of contributors for long-term participation and to help the participants contribute more effectively. To facilitate the reproduction of the study and of the proposed measures in other contexts, we provide the data we retrieved and the scripts we wrote at https://www.passion-lab.org/projects/developerfluency.html.

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  • Contributors rarely assume authority immediately; they progress from peripheral participation to more central involvement through learning, recognition, and sustained interaction.

    “Contributors rarely assume authority immediately. They progress from peripheral participation to more central forms of involvement through a combination of learning, recognition, and sustained interaction [48, 53, 58].”

    From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [58]

    The Introduction describes newcomers learning project norms and experienced contributors building rapport and taking on more important tasks. Section 4.1 describes learning through interaction with established members and small tasks, while Section 4.2.2 discusses attention from peers. The paper does not establish that contributors generally progress from peripheral participation to central involvement or gain authority through that particular combination of factors. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Contributors' trajectories are shaped not only by technical expertise but also by social and communicative engagement.

    “These trajectories are shaped not only by technical expertise, but also by social and communicative engagement, as contributors' progress depends on their ability to build relationships, exchange feedback, and gain recognition within the community [3, 49, 53, 58].”

    From Governance in Practice: How Open Source Projects Define and Document Roles (2026) · cites this paper as [58]

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Authors
Zhou, M., & Mockus, A.
Affiliations
  • Peking University (CN)
  • University of Tennessee at Knoxville (US)
ORCID
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
2015-01-01
Volume
41
Issue
1
Pages
82-99
ISSN
  • 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
  • 1939-3520
DOI
10.1109/tse.2014.2349496
OpenAlex
W1989862714
Cited by
141
References
8
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 17 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 3
FWCI
12.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplorehelp/downloads/license-information/OAPA.html (vor)
Locations
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • National Basic Research Program of China (2015CB352200)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (91118004, 61432001)
  • National Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (2012AA011202)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Open Source Software Innovations
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
Keywords
free and open source software, contributor retention, issue tracking systems, contributor onboarding, project popularity, peer attention, Mozilla, gnomes, reproducibility

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