Are Donation Badges Appealing? A Case Study of Developer Responses to Eclipse Bug Reports

TL;DR

This study investigates whether donation badges in Eclipse's bug tracking system influence developer response times, finding that badges lead to faster responses and are appealing due to their rewarding and inexpensive nature.

Contribution

It applies causal inference to quantify the effect of donation badges on response promptness, revealing a measurable decrease in response time.

Findings

Donation badges decrease response time by about two hours.

Badges are appealing for donors and organizers.

The effect is practically rewarding and inexpensive.

Abstract

Eclipse, an open source software project, acknowledges its donors by presenting donation badges in its issue tracking system Bugzilla. However, the rewarding effect of this strategy is currently unknown. We applied a framework of causal inference to investigate relative promptness of developer response to bug reports with donation badges compared with bug reports without the badges, and estimated that donation badges decreases developer response time by a median time of about two hours. The appearance of donation badges is appealing for both donors and organizers because of its practical, rewarding and yet inexpensive effect.