Mining Developer Contribution in Open Source Software Using Visualization Techniques

Abstract

The research of developers' contribution is an important part of the software evolution area. It allows project owners to find potential long-term contributors earlier and helps the newcomers to improve their behaviors. In this paper, we examined the contribution characteristics of developers in open source environment based on visual analysis, and presented approaches from three aspects-influencing factors, time characteristics and region characteristics. Our analysis used data from github and revealed some regular patterns. We found that the code which newcomers started to contribute with more people engaged in would lead to less contribution in some degree. We also found that there's a relation between developers' early and later period contribution. In addition, developers from different regions were more likely to have dominant relationship. Our findings may provide some support for future research in the area of software evolution.