@proceedings {1912, title = {Developer Turnover in Global, Industrial Open Source Projects: Insights from Applying Survival Analysis}, year = {2017}, note = {we study five industrial OSS projects of different sizes (in terms of software size, contributors and number of companies involved) and examine whether the duration of developers staying in a project is related to following four factors: (i) the time of first contribution, (ii) the rate of maintaining own files, (iii) the main action type, and (iv) the main job type projects: WikiMedia, OpenStack, GlusterFS from Red Hat, Xen Project from the Linux Foundation and Apache CloudStack}, month = {05/2017}, pages = {66-75}, abstract = {Large open source software projects often have a globally distributed development team. Studies have shown developer turnover has a significant impact on the project success. Frequent developer turnover may lead to loss of productivity due to lacking relevant knowledge and spending extra time learning how projects work. Thus, lots of attention has been paid to which factors are related to developer retention; however, few of them focus on the impact of activities of individual developers. In this paper, we study five open source projects from different organizations and examine whether developer turnover is affected by when they start contributing and what types of contributions they are making. Our study reveals that developers have higher chances to survive in software projects when they 1) start contributing to the project earlier; 2) mainly modify instead of creating files; 3) mainly code instead of dealing with documentations. Our results also shed lights on the potential approaches to improving developer retention.}, keywords = {survival analysis}, author = {Bin Lin and Gregorio Robles and Serebrenik, Alexander} } @article {1385, title = {Survival analysis on the duration of open source projects}, journal = {Information and Software Technology}, volume = {52}, year = {2010}, note = {"For the purposes of our study we used data coming only from source code repositories."}, month = {9/2010}, pages = {902 - 922}, abstract = {Context Open source (FLOSS) project survivability is an important piece of information for many open source stakeholders. Coordinators of open source projects would like to know the chances for the survival of the projects they coordinate. Companies are also interested in knowing how viable a project is in order to either participate or invest in it, and volunteers want to contribute to vivid projects. Objective The purpose of this article is the application of survival analysis techniques for estimating the future development of a FLOSS project. Method In order to apply such approach, duration data regarding FLOSS projects from the FLOSSMETRICS (This work was partially supported by the European Community{\textquoteright}s Sixth Framework Program under the Contract FP6-033982) database were collected. Such database contains metadata for thousands of FLOSS projects, derived from various forges. Subsequently, survival analysis methods were employed to predict the survivability of the projects, i.e. their probability of continuation in the future, by examining their duration, combined with other project characteristics such as their application domain and number of committers. Results It was shown how probability of termination or continuation may be calculated and how a prediction model may be built to upraise project future. In addition, the benefit of adding more committers to FLOSS projects was quantified. Conclusion Analysis results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework for assessing the survival probability of a FLOSS project. }, keywords = {flossmetrics, prediction, source code, survival analysis}, issn = {09505849}, doi = {10.1016/j.infsof.2010.05.001}, author = {Samoladas, Ioannis and Lefteris Angelis and Ioannis Stamelos} }