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A grounded theory of community package maintenance organizations

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Abstract

In many programming language ecosystems, developers rely more and more on external open source dependencies, made available through package managers. Key ecosystem packages that go unmaintained create a health risk for the projects that depend on them and for the ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, community initiatives can emerge to alleviate the problem by adopting packages in need of maintenance. The goal of our study is to explore such community initiatives, that we will designate from now on as Community Package Maintenance Organizations (CPMOs) and to build a theory of how and why they emerge, how they function and their impact on the surrounding ecosystems. To achieve this, we use a qualitative methodology called Grounded Theory. We have applied this methodology in two steps. First, on “extant” documents (documentation, discussions on public forums) originating from several CPMOs. From this data, we have built a theory of CPMOs, which we have then refined through interviews and reliability checks with CPMO participants. Our theory can inform developers willing to launch a CPMO in their own ecosystem and help current CPMO participants to better understand the state of the practice and what they could do better. It is a basis on which future research can be done on how to help open source ecosystems improve the maintenance status of their most important packages.

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Data Availability

Supporting data for this article is made available on Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20502228.v1. This dataset contains all the (initial and focused) codes for the public documents that have been used to generate the theory in this paper, as well as a mind map making the link between categories and quotes presented in this paper and the coded documents. The coded interview transcripts are excluded from this dataset and will only be made available privately at individual researchers’ request after getting permission from each of the interviewees.

Notes

  1. https://blog.logrocket.com/the-latest-npm-breach-or-is-it-a427617a4185/

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Ryan Rempel and Sebastian Wilzbach for accepting to be interviewed, and Karl Palmskog for providing feedback on our theory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

    Théo Zimmermann

  2. Univ. Bordeaux, Bordeaux INP, CNRS, Institut Universitaire de France, LaBRI, UMR 5800, F-33400, Talence, France

    Jean-Rémy Falleri

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  1. Théo Zimmermann
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Correspondence to Théo Zimmermann.

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Communicated by: Maria Teresa Baldassarre and Christoph Treude

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Zimmermann, T., Falleri, JR. A grounded theory of community package maintenance organizations. Empir Software Eng 28, 101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10337-4

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