TL;DR
This study introduces a novel method to detect inactivity periods of core OSS developers on GitHub, revealing patterns of breaks and transitions that can inform community management strategies.
Contribution
The paper presents a new approach to identify developer inactivity and provides empirical analysis of core developers' break patterns and transition probabilities.
Findings
94% of surveyed developers agreed with the inactivity model
Approximately 45% of core developers took at least one year-long break
Breaks longer than a year reduce the likelihood of returning to activity to around 21-26%
Abstract
Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers' inactive periods by analyzing the individual rhythm of contributions to the projects. Using this method, we quantitatively analyze the inactivity of core developers in 18 OSS organizations hosted on GitHub. We also survey core developers to receive their feedback about the identified breaks and transitions. Our results show that our method was effective for identifying developers' breaks. About 94% of the surveyed core developers agreed with our state model of inactivity; 71% and 79% of them acknowledged their breaks and state transition, respectively.…
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