Studying the association between Gitcoin's issues and resolving outcomes

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 4,000 Gitcoin bounty issues to understand factors influencing their success, highlighting key variables like project length, issue description, and bounty value, using statistical and machine learning methods.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of Gitcoin bounty outcomes and compares them with Bountysource, revealing key factors affecting bounty success.

Findings

Longer projects tend to have higher success rates.

Issue description quality correlates with outcomes.

Bounty value significantly impacts issue resolution.

Abstract

The development of open-source software (OSS) projects usually have been driven through collaborations among contributors and strongly relies on volunteering. Thus, allocating software practitioners (e.g., contributors) to a particular task is non-trivial and draws attention away from the development. Therefore, a number of bug bounty platforms have emerged to address this problem through bounty rewards. Especially, Gitcoin, a new bounty platform, introduces a bounty reward mechanism that allows individual issue owners (backers) to define a reward value using cryptocurrencies rather than using crowdfunding mechanisms. Although a number of studies have investigated the phenomenon on bounty platforms, those rely on different bounty reward systems. Our study thus investigates the association between the Gitcoin bounties and their outcomes (i.e., success and non-success). We empirically study over 4,000 issues with Gitcoin bounties using statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. We also conducted a comparative study with the Bountysource platform to gain insights into the usage of both platforms. Our study highlights the importance of factors such as the length of the project, issue description, type of bounty issue, and the bounty value, which are found to be highly correlated with the outcome of bounty issues. These findings can provide useful guidance to practitioners.