Impact of Developer Turnover on Quality in Open-Source Software

Matthieu Foucault (1) , Marc Palyart (2) , Xavier Blanc (1) , Gail C. Murphy (2) , Jean-Rémy Falleri (1)

1 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
2 UBC - University of British Columbia

Turnover is the phenomenon of continuous influx and retreat of human resources in a team. Despite being well-studied in many settings, turnover has not been characterized for open-source software projects. We study the source code repositories of five open-source projects to characterize patterns of turnover and to determine the effects of turnover on software quality. We define the base concepts of both external and internal turnover, which are the mobility of developers in and out of a project, and the mobility of developers inside a project, respectively. We provide a qualitative analysis of turnover patterns. We also found, in a quantitative analysis, that the activity of external newcomers negatively impact software quality.

Mots clés: Mining software repositories; qualitative analysis; software metrics

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Matthieu Foucault, Marc Palyart, Xavier Blanc, Gail C. Murphy, Jean-Rémy Falleri. Impact of Developer Turnover on Quality in Open-Source Software. Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Sep 2015, Bergamo, Italy. ⟨10.1145/2786805.2786870⟩. ⟨hal-01186466⟩