short-paper

Who gets a patch accepted first?: comparing the contributions of employees and volunteers

Authors:

Luiz Felipe Dias,

Igor SteinmacherAuthors Info & Claims

CHASE '18: Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Pages 110 - 113

https://doi.org/10.1145/3195836.3195858

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Although many software companies have recently embraced Open Source Software (OSS) initiatives, volunteers (i.e., developers who contribute to OSS in their spare time) still represent a wealthy workforce that have the potential of driving many non-trivial open source projects. Such volunteers face well-known barriers when attempting to contribute to OSS projects. However, what is still unclear is how the problems that volunteers face transcend to the problems that employees (i.e., developers hired by a software company to work on OSS projects) face. In this paper we aim to investigate the differences on the acceptance of patches submitted by volunteers and employees to company-owned OSS projects. We explore different characteristics of the patches submitted to company-owned OSS project, including: the frequency of acceptance and rejection; the total time to review and process a patch, and; whether the changes proposed follow some contribution best practices. We found that volunteers face 26X more rejections than employees. Volunteers have to wait, on average, 11 days to have a patch processed (employees wait 2 days, on average). 92% of the dormant pull-requests (e.g., pull-requests that take too long to be processed) were submitted by employees. Finally, we observed that the best practices that had the patches are most adherent to is "commit messages need to be written in English."

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Cited By

Zhang YQin MStol KZhou MLiu HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust ProjectProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639197(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639197
Khatoonabadi SAbdellatif ACosta DShihab E(2024)Predicting the First Response Latency of Maintainers and Contributors in Pull RequestsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.344374150:10(2529-2543)Online publication date: Oct-2024
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHASE '18: Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

May 2018

136 pages

ISBN:9781450357258

DOI:10.1145/3195836

Conference Chairs:
Helen Sharp
The Open University, United Kingdom
,
Cleidson R. B. de Souza
Universidade Federal do Pará and Instituto Tecnológico Vale, Tv, Brazil
,
Daniel Graziotin
University of Stuttgart, Germany
,
Meira Levy
Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel
,
David Socha
University of Washington Bothell

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 27 May 2018

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ICSE '18

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ICSE '18: 40th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 27, 2018

Gothenburg, Sweden

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Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 70 submissions, 67%

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Cited By

Zhang YQin MStol KZhou MLiu HRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust ProjectProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639197(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597503.3639197
Khatoonabadi SAbdellatif ACosta DShihab E(2024)Predicting the First Response Latency of Maintainers and Contributors in Pull RequestsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.344374150:10(2529-2543)Online publication date: Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2024.3443741
Oliveira MBraga RGhiotto GDavid JCampos FStröele V(2024)Collab-RS: semantic recommendation of external collaborators for projects in software ecosystemsKnowledge and Information Systems10.1007/s10115-023-01954-y66:1(147-186)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10115-023-01954-y
Perpétua SVieira SPortela CSouza M(2023)A Systematic Mapping Study of the Onboarding Process in Software Development OrganizationsProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality10.1145/3629479.3629500(11-20)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2023
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Khatoonabadi SCosta DMujahid SShihab E(2023)Understanding the Helpfulness of Stale Bot for Pull-Based Development: An Empirical Study of 20 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/362473933:2(1-43)Online publication date: 23-Dec-2023
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Khatoonabadi SCosta DAbdalkareem RShihab E(2023)On Wasted Contributions: Understanding the Dynamics of Contributor-Abandoned Pull Requests–A Mixed-Methods Study of 10 Large Open-Source ProjectsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/353078532:1(1-39)Online publication date: 13-Feb-2023
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Zhang XYu YGousios GRastogi A(2023)Pull Request Decisions Explained: An Empirical OverviewIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.316505649:2(849-871)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2023
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Kudrjavets GNagappan NRastogi ALo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Do small code changes merge faster?Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528448(537-548)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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Kudrjavets GKumar ANagappan NRastogi ALo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Mining code review data to understand waiting times between acceptance and mergingProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528432(579-590)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
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Samuel BBala HDaniel SRamesh V(2022)Deconstructing the Nature of Collaboration in Organizations Open Source Software Development: The Impact of Developer and Task CharacteristicsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.310893548:10(3969-3987)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
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