Magnet or sticky? an OSS project-by-project typology

Authors: Kazuhiro Yamashita Shane McIntosh Yasutaka Kamei Naoyasu Ubayashi

Venue: MSR   11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, pp. 344–347, 2013

Year: 2013

Abstract: For Open Source Software (OSS) projects, retaining existing contributors and attracting new ones is a major concern. In this paper, we expand and adapt a pair of population migration metrics to analyze migration trends in a collection of open source projects. Namely, we study: (1) project stickiness, i.e., its tendency to retain existing contributors and (2) project magnetism, i.e., its tendency to attract new contributors. Using quadrant plots, we classify projects as attractive (highly magnetic and sticky), stagnant (highly sticky, weakly magnetic), fluctuating (highly magnetic, weakly sticky), or terminal (weakly magnetic and sticky). Through analysis of the MSR challenge dataset, we find that: (1) quadrant plots can effectively identify at-risk projects, (2) stickiness is often motivated by professional activity and (3) transitions among quadrants as a project ages often coincides with interesting events in the evolution history of a project.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{kazuhiroyamashita2013mosaopt,
    author = "Kazuhiro Yamashita and Shane McIntosh and Yasutaka Kamei and Naoyasu Ubayashi",
    title = "Magnet or sticky? an OSS project-by-project typology",
    year = "2013",
    pages = "344–347",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories"
}

Plain Text:

Kazuhiro Yamashita, Shane McIntosh, Yasutaka Kamei, and Naoyasu Ubayashi, "Magnet or sticky? an OSS project-by-project typology," 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, pp. 344–347