Relationship between diversity of collaborative group members’ race and ethnicity and the frequency of their collaborative contributions in GitHub

Online collaborative platforms provide an environment for diverse developers to collaborate together in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Previous studies in Software Engineering have shown the benefits of increasing gender and tenure diversity in OSS projects. However, little is known about racial and ethnic diversity’s role in OSS projects. An empirical study that analyzes how peer members’ racial and ethnic diversity in a collaborative group relates to the frequency of their collaborative contributions in OSS projects. We performed a large-scale quantitative analysis of the relationship between the race and ethnicity of peer members in a collaborative group and the frequency of their collaborative contributions in GitHub. We first inferred the peers working in collaborative groups within a project based on the collaboration between the developers in that project. We then used the Name-Prism tool to extract the race and ethnicity of the collaborative group’s peers from the names they use in GitHub. We finally used mixed effects regression modeling of the group members’ contributions – measured by the total number of pull requests merged as a collaborative group – to assess the relationship between the racial and ethnic diversity of the members in a collaborative group and the frequency of their collaborative contributions. Our results indicate that (1) a major part of the developers’ population are White developers; (2.1) the distribution of collaborative members’ contributions from homogeneous and heterogeneous collaborative groups, with respect to the race and ethnicity of the groups’ members, is different. Heterogeneous groups have a higher median number of contributions than homogeneous groups; and (2.2) the diversity of race and ethnicity of members in a collaborative group does have a statistically significant relationship with the frequency of the collaborative group members’ contributions. The racial and ethnic diversity of peer members in a collaborative group may have a role to play in the frequency of groups’ contributions in OSS. Hence, further research is needed to understand how the diverse racial and ethnic composition of collaborative group members leads to a higher rate of group contributions.