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Empirical Software Engineering
Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering 3/2023

01.05.2023

Cross-status communication and project outcomes in OSS development

A language style matching perspective

verfasst von: Yisi Han, Zhendong Wang, Yang Feng, Zhihong Zhao, Yi Wang

Erschienen in: Empirical Software Engineering | Ausgabe 3/2023

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Abstract

Context

The success of an open source software (OSS) project requires effective communication among its members. Given that OSS projects often have established social status systems, such communication may happen between individuals of different statuses, particularly, elite developers with project management privileges and ordinary project contributors. They communicate with each other on many essential activities, e.g., bug fixing, code review, etc., thus having profound influences on project outcomes.

Objectives

We seek to develop an understanding of cross-status communication from a perspective of language style matching among developers of different status, and its relationships with an OSS project’s outcomes in terms of productivity and quality.

Method

We approach the above research objectives with the language style matching (LSM) tool, which measures the similarities of cross-status communication in multiple language style features. We first dynamically identify elite developers having project administration privileges for each sampled project. Then, we capture the cross-status communication between elite and non-elite developers; and calculate the LSM features of these two groups of individuals. The LSM variables, together with project outcomes, were used to fit regression models to analyze potential relationships between cross-status communication’s language matching and project outcomes.

Results

Using over 275,000 collected conversations, our analyses yield rich insights into cross-status communication in open source development. First, our results reveal that the elite and non-elite developers exhibit quite similar linguistic patterns in using certain categories of words. Second, we explore the relationships between linguistic similarity in cross-status communication and project outcomes. The regression results are generally negative, indicating there might be very limited significant relationships between cross-status communication’s language matching and project outcomes, with a few exceptions.

Limitations

The study has several limitations. First, it considers projects hosted on GitHub only. Second, to ensure data availability, our sample is drawn from top projects, thus not representing all projects. Third, we only consider a limited number of linguistic features, and indicators for project outcomes.

Registered Report

This study is developed from the registered report available at: https://​arxiv.​org/​abs/​2104.​05538. This registered report was accepted at the MSR 2021 Registered Reports Track.
Vorheriger Artikel Deep learning approaches for bad smell detection: a systematic literature review
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Fußnoten
1
Originally, we sample 200 projects, however, 34 are removed for not having enough cross-status conversations. For validity considerations, we do not try to substitute the removed project through another round of random sampling, and use the data of the left 166 projects in data analyses (see Section 4.1).
 
3
A manual procedure is performed to distinguish software development projects from other projects, e.g., tutorial collections.
 
5
The current version of the GitHub API only allows us to access 300 events or events in up to the past 90 days, whichever is met first.
 
6
This category includes the following languages:
 
7
Note that the control variables “Programming Language” and “Domain” are represented by a set of dummy variables because they are categorical variables.
 
8
The Cohen’s \(f^2\)s are calculated and interpreted according to Steiger (2004). Note that Cohen’s \(f^2\)s is relative to the control model (\(Model_0\)), rather than the null model. Thus, we take \(0.1^2 = 0.01\), \(0.25^2=0.06\) and \(0.4^2 = 0.16\) as the threshold for small, medium, and large, respectively.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
Cross-status communication and project outcomes in OSS development
A language style matching perspective
verfasst von
Yisi Han
Zhendong Wang
Yang Feng
Zhihong Zhao
Yi Wang
Publikationsdatum
01.05.2023
Verlag
Springer US
Erschienen in
Empirical Software Engineering / Ausgabe 3/2023
Print ISSN: 1382-3256
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7616
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10298-8

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