On Developers' Personality in Large-scale Distributed Projects: The Case of the Apache Ecosystem

TL;DR

This study analyzes the personalities of developers in large-scale open source projects within the Apache ecosystem, revealing personality trait trends over time and factors influencing contribution likelihood.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis of developer personalities in open source projects, highlighting trait evolution and influence on contribution behavior.

Findings

Developers become more conscientious, agreeable, and neurotic over time.

Personality traits do not vary significantly with role or contribution extent.

Open and agreeable developers are more likely to contribute.

Abstract

Large-scale distributed projects are typically the results of collective efforts performed by multiple developers, each one having a different personality. The study of developers' personalities has the potential of explaining their' behavior in various contexts. For example, the propensity to trust others, a critical factor to the success of global software engineering - has been found to influence positively the result of code reviews in distributed projects. In this paper, we perform a quantitative analysis of developers' personality in open source software projects, intended as an extreme form of distributed projects in which no single organization controls the project. We mine ecosystem-level data from the code commits and email messages contributed by the developers working on the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects, as representative of large scale-distributed projects. We find that developers become over time more conscientious, agreeable, and neurotic. Moreover, personality traits do not vary with their role, membership, and extent of contribution to the projects. We also find evidence that more open and more agreeable developers are more likely to become project contributors.