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Cross-status communication and project outcomes in OSS development

A language style matching perspective

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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.

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Data Availability

The datasets that support the findings of this study are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/HAAAAAN/cross-status-lsm.

Notes

  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).

  2. https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-access-to-your-organizations-repositories/repository-roles-for-an-organization

  3. A manual procedure is performed to distinguish software development projects from other projects, e.g., tutorial collections.

  4. Access via Google BigQuery: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?project=githubarchive &page=project &pli=1.

  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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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers in both the registered report phase and the paper submission phase. This work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under the grant 62172049, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, Jiangsu, China

    Yisi Han & Yang Feng

  2. Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, 92697, CA, USA

    Zhendong Wang

  3. Suzhou City University, Suzhou, 215000, Jiangsu, China

    Zhihong Zhao

  4. School of Computer Science (National Pilot Software Engineering School) and Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service (MoE), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China

    Yi Wang

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Han, Y., Wang, Z., Feng, Y. et al. Cross-status communication and project outcomes in OSS development. Empir Software Eng 28, 78 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10298-8

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