How Does Contributors' Involvement Influence the Build Status of an Open-Source Software Project?

Abstract

The recent introduction of the pull-based development model promoted agile development practices such as Code Reviews and Continuous Integration (CI). CI, in particular, is currently a standard development practice in open-source software (OSS) projects. Although it is well-known that OSS contributors have different involvements (e.g., while some developers drive the project, there is a long tail of peripheral developers), little is known about how the contributor's degree of participation can influence the build status of an OSS project. Through TravisTorrent's dataset, we compare the success rates of builds made by casual and non-casual contributors and what factors on their contributions may influence the build result. Our results suggest that there is no representative difference between their build success (they are similar in 85% of the analyzed projects), meaning that being a casual contributor is not a strong indicator for creating failing builds. Also, factors like the size of their contributions and the number of project configurations (jobs) have the potential of impacting the build success.