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FSE 2015

Impact of developer turnover on quality in open-source software

Matthieu Foucault, Marc Palyart, Xavier Blanc, Gail C. Murphy, Jean-Rémy Falleri

PDFDOI 10.1145/2786805.2786870dblp

Abstract

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.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{Foucault-al:FSE15,
  author    = {Matthieu Foucault and
               Marc Palyart and
               Xavier Blanc and
               Gail C. Murphy and
               Jean{-}R{\'{e}}my Falleri},
  title     = {Impact of developer turnover on quality in open-source software},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages     = {829--841},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2015},
}

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