CARE TO COMMENT ON FLOSSING? ISSUE COMMENTS AND DISENGAGEMENT IN OPEN SOURCE

Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Lepinski, Matthew

Area of Concentration

Computer Science and Statistics

Abstract

Free/libre open source software (FLOSS) is a critical tool used as digital infrastructure for lots of modern software projects. Open source project survival is important because these projects exist in a network of interdependencies, so the failure of one project can not only hurt the other open source projects in its network, but also the other software projects that rely on them from credit bureaus to Instagram. The disengagement of open source contributors, especially core contributors, has a serious impact on the survival probability of a project. Previous research has explored various avenues of understanding disengagement including technical factors and project characteristics. However, communication, especially the content of communication is an under-explored avenue in disengagement research. In this thesis we create a classifier for issue comments and we then investigate the differences between the types of issue comments written by core contributors who disengage versus those who do not. We learned there is a significant difference in the average number of comments written across the two groups for all comment types. We also found that writing more Action on Issue comments, i.e., comments discussing the management of the issue thread itself, leads to a lower probability of disengagement.

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