Home » Papers

Impact of Stakeholder Type and Collaboration on Issue Resolution Time in OSS Projects

Submitted by msquire on Thu, 2011-12-01 09:23
TitleImpact of Stakeholder Type and Collaboration on Issue Resolution Time in OSS Projects
Publication TypeConference Proceedings
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsDuc, Ach Nguyen, Cruzes Daniela S., Ayala Claudia, and Conradi Reidar
Secondary TitleOpen Source Systems: Grounding Research (OSS 2011)
Pagination1-16
Date Published10/2011
PublisherSpringer
KeywordsCOLLABORATION, companies, coordination, defects, feature requests, geronimo, jira, qpid, qt, social network analysis, volunteer
Abstract

Initialized by a collective contribution of volunteer developers, Open source software (OSS) attracts an increasing involvement of commercial firms. Many OSS projects are composed of a mix group of firm-paid and volunteer developers, with different motivations, collaboration practices and working styles. As OSS development consists of collaborative works in nature, it is important to know whether these differences have an impact on collaboration between difference types of stakeholders, which lead to an influence in the project outcomes. In this paper, we empirically investigate the firm-paid participation in resolving OSS evolution issues, the stakeholder collaboration and its impact on OSS issue resolution time. The results suggest that though a firm-paid assigned developer resolves much more issues than a volunteer developer does, there is no difference in issue resolution time between them. Besides, the more important factor that influences the issue resolution time comes from the collaboration among stakeholders rather than from individual characteristics.
Notes

"First, we characterize the difference in the average amount of resolved issues and issue resolution time between a volunteer assignee and a firm-paid assignee....Second, we investigate collaboration among stakeholders in OSS projects by using Social network metrics and analysis. Last, we explore the impact of the collaboration measures on issue resolution time."

"Three OSS projects were selected for our study, namely Qt, Qpid and Geronimo"

"All software issues were collected from JIRA repositories...Issue resolution time was computed by using the created time field and the issue resolved time field."