Contribution-Based Firing of Developers?

Vincenzo Orrei, Marco Raglianti, Csaba Nagy, Michele Lanza

Abstract

There has been some recent clamor about the developer layoff and turnover policies enacted by high-profile corporate executives. Precisely defining the contributions in software development has always been a thorny issue, as it is difficult to establish a developer’s “performance” without recurring to guesswork, due to how software development works and how Git persists history. Taking inspiration from a seemingly informal notion, the pony factor, we present an approach to identify the key developers in a software project. We present an analysis of 1,011 GitHub repositories, providing fact-based reflections on development contributions.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Orrei-al:FSE23,
  author    = {Vincenzo Orrei and
               Marco Raglianti and
               Csaba Nagy and
               Michele Lanza},
  title     = {{Contribution-Based} Firing of Developers?},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages     = {2062--2066},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2023},
}

Contribution-Based Firing of Developers?

Abstract

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