Activity-Based Analysis of Open Source Software Contributors: Roles and Dynamics
This provides design guidelines for OSS tools to better support diverse contributors, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Activity Theory.
The paper tackled the problem of uniform user interfaces in open source software tools by analyzing contributor roles and dynamics, identifying six activities that distinguished nine roles and patterns in role changes from 29 GitHub projects.
Contributors to open source software (OSS) communities assume diverse roles to take different responsibilities. One major limitation of the current OSS tools and platforms is that they provide a uniform user interface regardless of the activities performed by the various types of contributors. This paper serves as a non-trivial first step towards resolving this challenge by demonstrating a methodology and establishing knowledge to understand how the contributors' roles and their dynamics, reflected in the activities contributors perform, are exhibited in OSS communities. Based on an analysis of user action data from 29 GitHub projects, we extracted six activities that distinguished four Active roles and five Supporting roles of OSS contributors, as well as patterns in role changes. Through the lens of the Activity Theory, these findings provided rich design guidelines for OSS tools to support diverse contributor roles.