short-paper

Public Access

Timezone and time-of-day variance in GitHub teams: an empirical method and study

Authors:

Premkumar Devanbu,

Pallavi Kudigrama,

Cindy Rubio-González,

Bogdan VasilescuAuthors Info & Claims

SWAN 2017: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software Analytics

Pages 19 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1145/3121257.3121261

Published: 04 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Open source projects based in ecosystems like GitHub seamlessly allow distributed software development. Contributors to some GitHub projects may originate from many different timezones; in others they may all reside in just one timezone. How might this timezone dispersion (or concentration) affect the diurnal distribution of work activity in these projects? In commercial projects, there has been a desire to use top-down management and work allocation to exploit timezone dispersion of project teams, to engender a more round-the-clock work cycle. We focus on GitHub, and explore the relationship between timezone dispersion and work activity dispersion. We find that while time-of-day work activity dispersion is indeed associated strongly with timezone dispersion, it is equally (if not more strongly) affected by project team size.

References

[1]

C. Bird and N. Nagappan. Who? where? what?: examining distributed development in two large open source projects. In MSR’12, pages 237–246.

[2]

M. Cataldo. Sources of errors in distributed development projects: implications for collaborative tools. In CSCW’10, pages 281–290.

Digital Library

[3]

J. Colazo. Structural changes associated with the temporal dispersion of teams: Evidence from open source software projects. In HICSS’14, pages 300–309.

[4]

J. A. Colazo and Y. Fang. Following the sun: Temporal dispersion and performance in open source software project teams. JAIS’10.

[5]

J. A. Espinosa, N. Nan, and E. Carmel. Temporal distance, communication patterns, and task performance in teams. JMIS’15, pages 151–191.

[6]

M. Gharehyazie and V. Filkov. Tracing distributed collaborative development in apache software projects. ESE’16, pages 1–36.

[7]

M. Gharehyazie, D. Posnett, B. Vasilescu, and V. Filkov. Developer initiation and social interactions in OSS: A case study of the Apache Software Foundation. Empirical Software Engineering, 20(5):1318–1353, 2015.

Digital Library

[8]

J. M. Gonzalez-Barahona, G. Robles, and D. Izquierdo-Cortazar. Determining the geographical distribution of a community by means of a time-zone analysis. In OpenSym’16.

Digital Library

[9]

A. Gopal, J. A. Espinosa, S. Gosain, and D. P. Darcy. Coordination and performance in global software service delivery. IEEE-TEM’11, pages 772–785, 2011.

[10]

G. Gousios and D. Spinellis. GHTorrent: Github’s data from a �rehose. In MSR’12, pages 12–21.

[11]

G. Mark, S. T. Iqbal, M. Czerwinski, and P. Johns. Bored mondays and focused afternoons: the rhythm of attention and online activity in the workplace. In CHI’14, pages 3025–3034.

Digital Library

[12]

S. Nakagawa and H. Schielzeth. A general and simple method for obtaining r 2 from generalized linear mixed-e�ects models. MEE’13, pages 133–142.

[13]

A. Nguyen-Duc, D. S. Cruzes, and R. Conradi. The impact of global dispersion on coordination, performance and software quality–a systematic literature review. IST’15, pages 277–294.

[14]

R. Prikladnicki and E. Carmel. Is time-zone proximity an advantage for software development? the case of the brazilian it industry. In ICSE’13, pages 973–981.

[15]

D. Riehle, P. Riemer, C. Kolassa, and M. Schmidt. Paid vs. volunteer work in open source. In HICSS’14, pages 3286–3295.

[16]

A. Schilling, S. Laumer, and T. Weitzel. Together but apart: how spatial, temporal and cultural distances a�ect �oss developers’ project retention. In CPR’13.

[17]

A. Sivunen, N. Nurmi, and J. Koroma. When a one-hour time di�erence is too much: Temporal boundaries in global virtual work. In HICSS’16, pages 511–520.

[18]

Y. Takhteyev and A. Hilts. Investigating the geography of open source software through github, 2010.

[19]

J. C. Tang, C. Zhao, X. Cao, and K. Inkpen. Your time zone or mine?: a study of globally time zone-shifted collaboration. In CSCW’11, pages 235–244.

Cited By

Xia XWeng ZWang WZhao S(2022)Exploring Activity and Contributors on GitHub: Who, What, When, and Where2022 29th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00013(11-20)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00013
Zhang MLiu HChen CLiu YBai S(2022)Consistent or not? An investigation of using Pull Request Template in GitHubInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106797144:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106797
Klug DBogart CHerbsleb J(2021)"They Can Only Ever Guide"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492325:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449232
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Timezone and time-of-day variance in GitHub teams: an empirical method and study
1. Social and professional topics
  1. User characteristics
    1. Geographic characteristics

Recommendations

An Empirical Study of the Dynamics of GitHub Repository and Its Impact on Distributed Software Development
Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2014 Workshops - Volume 8842

GitHub is a distributed code repository and project hosting web site. It is becoming one of the most popular web-based services to host both open-source projects and closed-source projects. In this paper, we review different kinds of version control ...
Identifying unmaintained projects in github
ESEM '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

Background: Open source software has an increasing importance in modern software development. However, there is also a growing concern on the sustainability of such projects, which are usually managed by a small number of developers, frequently working ...
A panel data set of cryptocurrency development activity on GitHub
MSR '19: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Cryptocurrencies are a significant development in recent years, featuring in global news, the financial sector, and academic research. They also hold a significant presence in open source development, comprising some of the most popular repositories on ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SWAN 2017: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software Analytics

September 2017

26 pages

ISBN:9781450351577

DOI:10.1145/3121257

General Chairs:
Olga Baysal,
Tim Menzies

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 September 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Short-paper

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

ESEC/FSE'17

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'17: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

September 4, 2017

Paderborn, Germany

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

5
Total Citations
View Citations
291
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)65
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)12

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Xia XWeng ZWang WZhao S(2022)Exploring Activity and Contributors on GitHub: Who, What, When, and Where2022 29th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC)10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00013(11-20)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00013
Zhang MLiu HChen CLiu YBai S(2022)Consistent or not? An investigation of using Pull Request Template in GitHubInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106797144:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2021.106797
Klug DBogart CHerbsleb J(2021)"They Can Only Ever Guide"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34492325:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449232
Sarker FVasilescu BBlincoe KFilkov VAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)Socio-technical work-rate increase associates with changes in work patterns in online projectsProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00099(936-947)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE.2019.00099
Dueñas SCosentino VRobles GGonzalez-Barahona JChaudron MCrnkovic IChechik MHarman M(2018)PercevalProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings10.1145/3183440.3183475(1-4)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183440.3183475

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten