Understanding Contributor to Developer Turnover Patterns in OSS Projects: A Case Study of Apache Projects

OSS projects are dynamic in nature. Developers
contribute to a project for a certain period of time and later
leave the project or join other projects of high interest. Hence,
the OSS community always welcomes members who can attain
the role of a developer in a project. In this paper, we investigate
contributions made by members who have attained the role of
a developer. In particular, we study the contributions made by
the members in terms of bugs reported, comments on bugs,
source-code patch submissions, and their social relation with
other members of an OSS community. Further, we study the
significance of nondevelopers contribution and investigate if
and to what extent they play a role in the long-term survival
of an OSS project. Moreover, we investigate the ratio of
contributions made by a member before and after attaining
the role of a developer. We have outlined 4 research questions
in this regard and further discuss our findings based on the
research questions by taking into account data from software
repositories of 4 different Apache projects.