Early Identification of Future Committers in Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

There exists two types of developers in Open Source Software (OSS) projects: 1) Committers who have permission to commit edited source code to the Version Control System (VCS), 2) Developers who contribute source code but cannot commit to the VCS directly. In order to develop and evolve high quality OSS, projects are always in search of new committers. OSS projects often promote strong developers to become committers. When existing committers find strong developers, they propose their promotion to a committer role. Delaying the committer-promotion might lead to strong developers departing from an OSS project and the project losing them. However early committer-promotion comes with its own slew of risks as well (e.g., the promotion of inexperienced developers). Hence, committer-promotion decisions are critical for the quality and successful evolution of OSS projects. In this paper, we examine the committer-promotion phenomena for two OSS projects (Eclipse and Firefox). We find that the amount of activities by future committers was higher than the amount of activities by developers who did not become committers). We also find that some developers are promoted to a committer role very rapidly (within a few month) while some of developers take over one year to become a committer. Finally, we develop a committer-identification model to assist OSS projects identifying future committers.