Whom Are You Going to Call?: Determinants of @-Mentions in GitHub Discussions
This addresses the challenge of efficiently allocating tasks in open-source software projects, though it is incremental as it builds on prior work linking mentions to faster issue resolution.
The study tackled the problem of predicting which developers are likely to be @-mentioned in GitHub discussions, finding that visibility, expertise, and productivity increase mentions, while responsiveness does not, and that overall models can be used for cross-project prediction.
Open Source Software (OSS) project success relies on crowd contributions. When an issue arises in pull-request based systems, @-mentions are used to call on people to task; previous studies have shown that @-mentions in discussions are associated with faster issue resolution. In most projects there may be many developers who could technically handle a variety of tasks. But OSS supports dynamic teams distributed across a wide variety of social and geographic backgrounds, as well as levels of involvement. It is, then, important to know whom to call on, i.e., who can be relied or trusted with important task-related duties, and why. In this paper, we sought to understand which observable socio-technical attributes of developers can be used to build good models of them being future @-mentioned in GitHub issues and pull request discussions. We built overall and project-specific predictive models of future @-mentions, in order to capture the determinants of @-mentions in each of two hundred GitHub projects, and to understand if and how those determinants differ between projects. We found that visibility, expertise, and productivity are associated with an increase in @-mentions, while responsiveness is not, in the presence of a number of control variables. Also, we find that though project-specific differences exist, the overall model can be used for cross-project prediction, indicating its GitHub-wide utility.