How Does Contributors’ Involvement Influence the Build Status of an Open-Source Software Project?

The recent introduction of the pull-based development
model promoted agile development practices such as
Code Reviews and Continuous Integration (CI). CI, in particular,
is currently a standard development practice in opensource
software (OSS) projects. Although it is well-known that
OSS contributors have different involvements (e.g., while some
developers drive the project, there is a long tail of peripheral
developers), little is known about how the contributor’s degree
of participation can influence the build status of an OSS project.
Through TravisTorrent’s dataset, we compare the success rates
of builds made by casual and non-casual contributors and what
factors on their contributions may influence the build result. Our
results suggest that there is no representative difference between
their build success (they are similar in 85% of the analyzed
projects), meaning that being a casual contributor is not a strong
indicator for creating failing builds. Also, factors like the size
of their contributions and the number of project configurations
(jobs) have the potential of impacting the build success.